Short Fiction to Cleanse the Palate

 

To celebrate the paperback release of Gary Indiana's memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love, we are proud to share an excerpt from the book, a sexy, literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work. In this excerpt, Gary takes us to his commune-hopping period in late-60s San Francisco, introducing us to an incredible cast of characters — his lovers, their lovers, his friends, their friends, their roommates, his roommates, etc — who set out, together, to create a porn movie called The Straight Banana.

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Things to remember better: Ferd Eggan entered my life in San Francisco in 1969. I had dropped out of Berkeley. I had what today are called sexual identity issues that made it impossible to focus in any degree-winning manner on philosophy and English literature, my purported areas of study. I had drifted away from classes and moved out of student housing, crashing at various communes around the Berkeley campus. One was a Trotskyite commune. Another housed a study group of Frankfurt School scholars with guest lectures by Herbert Marcuse and also raised money for the Tupamaros. Another went in for encounter sessions and scream therapy. My final Berkeley commune was devoted to growing peyote cacti and magic mushrooms. I met Ferd on a film set. He was helming a new wrinkle in the developing canon of narrative porn cinema from his own co-authored script, The Straight Banana (“exhibitionist flashes nymphomaniac, fucking ensues!”—a meet-cute picture). I was “sexually involved” by that time—not on camera—with one of the stars of The Straight Banana, a tall, bisexual Nebraskan refugee often billed as Mr. Johnny Raw, or plain Johnny Raw, whose penis was a minor celebrity in the Bay Area.

Johnny Raw, aka Leonard Jones of Omaha, lived in the Marina district. I never socialized with him. I hardly knew him. I didn’t care about him. His self-involvement was hermetic and vaguely reptilian. Johnny Raw referred to the creeps who bought tickets to jerk off watching his films as “the fans,” and believed he was an actual movie star. He was boastful, stupid, pathetically narcissistic, and sad, but such a deluded asshole it was impossible to feel sorry for him. I liked how he looked, he liked how I looked looking at him, that was literally all we shared. Whenever we stumbled over each other that summer, both in half-drunk stupors, in the same bar, at the same midnight hour, we rushed robotically to the Marina in a cab, and got it on—without passing Go, without collecting two hundred dollars, without spending a minute longer in each other’s company afterward than I needed to put my clothes on.

I never took my clothes off, actually. Johnny Raw usually pulled his dick and balls out of his fly or lowered his pants to his ankles. Gay youth today may find it incomprehensible, but “having sex” with Johnny Raw ten or fifteen times that summer didn’t involve Johnny Raw fucking me, or me fucking Johnny Raw. I was unusually innocent for my age — and, it’s the truth, unusually pretty and sought after at nineteen. I admit that by my present lights, I’d have to agree with former President Clinton that he “did not have sex with that woman.” By today’s standards, I had been around too long to hook up with men and then do nothing besides service them with a blowjob. But that’s as far as I’d ever gone. Regardless of a precocious history of fellatio with other boys since the seventh grade, I had no concept of anal sex. I wasn’t aware of it as something many people did. A true son of 1950s backwoods New Hampshire, I thought sodomy was an arcane, specialized perversion, like bestiality. Believed, in fact, that a rectum capable of accommodating even an average penis was such an aberration of nature that only rare, anally deformed individuals even attempted it. “Fucking,” in my mind, meant male-on-female vaginal penetration.

For a while post-Berkeley, I lived in the attic of a hippie commune with no special theme going on, in a leased house on Seventeenth Street. By coincidence, a tenant below was Johnny Raw’s costar in The Straight Banana. Grinda Pupic, a licensed practical nurse whose legal name was Bonnie Solomon, secured the attic for me when I moved across the bay, as a favor to a Berkeley friend of a friend.

A relentlessly sultry, ebulliently secular Jew, Bonnie’s sang-froid enabled her to resume her side of an argument about local zoning laws between takes, while the bone-hard penis of a costar remained planted in her lady parts. Among friends and coworkers she exuded a generally misleading maternal solicitude. At the Nocturnal Dream Shows in North Beach, Bonnie sang with the Nickelettes, a hallucinatory, feminist auxiliary of the Cockettes. We occasionally had sex. I wasn’t a frontal virgin. Bonnie was awfully nice and surprisingly tough.

I tagged along on a location shoot in the Sausalito hills, riding shotgun in a pickup driven by a hippie sound engineer, a roguishly bearded ex-Mouseketeer with a doomed aura named Brando Batty. (According to the state of California, that really was his real name. He once showed me his driver’s license.) By nightfall I had a temp job, as emergency gaffer and continuity girl on The Straight Banana shoot. My thing with the eponymous Straight Banana (we just referred to him as Banana, really) quickly lapsed, in the easy manner of the day, into a different thing with Ferd, who already had a male squeeze and a more involved relationship with an older woman named Carol. 

She wasn’t much older, chronologically, but her weariness suggested she’d survived the Titanic and much else of cosmic historical significance. Older than a thousand years, still bitter over some deal gone terribly south in ancient Babylon, Carol sat stiffly in Brando Batty’s truck all afternoon, penciling irritable remarks on the script she’d co-written, or flipping through Variety. I sensed a crazy attraction to Ferd, but became completely spellbound by Carol. She had the vibe of somebody who’d lived the nightmare in a big, expensive way. Short, wiry limbed, her glossy auburn hair poodled in a perky cut, she seemed implacable enough to launch a military coup in South America.

Sporadically emerging from her four-wheel bunker during lulls in the filming, she’d march directly up to Ferd to give him notes before talking to anyone else. She blinked theatrically at the sun; slid her sunglasses down from their nest in her hair; aimed a studied yawn in our general direction; lit a Marlboro with a silver lighter; smoothed her throat with the fingers she’d covered the yawn with. Each movement set off baffling signals, her private-looking little actions both seductive and off-putting, a selfishly generous display: as she studied her effect on people, Carol also telegraphed her utter indifference to whatever effect that was. I instinctively sensed she would shove me or anybody else out of a lifeboat if she thought they added too much weight. But I often dismissed as paranoid intuitions that were as obvious as giant letters on a billboard. Ferd was as easy-going as Carol was brittle. He japed, mugged, giggled, flirted, bantered with everyone while setting up shots, giving actors notes, squinting into the Arriflex viewfinder. His infectious looseness visibly stiffened when Carol asserted her presence. Their gravity together engraved a “serious” grown-up circle around them. The pornographic circus it excluded looked embarrassingly silly and juvenile, suddenly.

. . .

To say I fell in love with Ferd the day I met him wouldn’t be completely wrong, but sounds schmaltzy if I consider how little feeling I had for Johnny Raw from the jump, aside from a fascination with the body part that made him famous. In less than an hour around Ferd, Johnny evaporated from my consciousness.

Ferd was the first male I ever felt attracted to who was smarter than me, intellect never having been conspicuous in the few men I had “dated” before. Decades later, after his looks went, his charisma continued to make him beautiful, in a wasted, Egon Schiele way. I’ve thought about Ferd over much of my life, and find him full of contradictions, but this is what seems constant: his intellectual finesse; his formidable conviction that his sense of reality trumped all others’; a decency of heart often wildly at odds with situations I found him in, as well as with the first two qualities I mentioned.

None of this was entirely apparent when I met him, when he lived with Carol. I quickly got tangled up with both of them, cast in confusing roles as an understudy to Ferd’s boyfriend, Chip (who I never knew beyond hello good-bye), and as a way-ward urchin Ferd and Carol adopted. They collected people like pollen sticking to their clothes: runaways, burnouts, lost souls of all sorts. Carol acted as a vulpine den mother to a shifting cast of acolytes and hangers-on.

She reigned over the upper floors of a five-story Victorian on Broderick Street that exuded lifeless desuetude. Charles, the owner, retired from some clandestine profession, occupied in perpetuity a wing chair facing the fireplace in a musty floor-through salon on the ground floor. He passed his days draining tall cans of Rainier Ale while staring at a TV that was seldom actually on, stacking ale cans in green pyramids that almost brushed the high ceiling. Exactly where in that somnolent house Charles kept the box of earth where he slept, I never knew. His alleged college roommate, Steve, a more tangible, slightly corpulent man of sixty-two, was given to “sporty” plaid shirts, fishing pants with many pockets, and muted red loafers. Steve inhabited a room in the basement. Charles was a man of no words. Steve had a certain voluble joie de vivre. In a pinch, one might call him jolly. He wasn’t really.

In the fullness of time I became a tenant. I was given a claustrophobic child-size room on the third floor containing a canopied bed, a framed charcoal drawing of Leopold Stokowski, and a ceiling bulb. But not yet.

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From I Can Give You Anything But Love by Gary Indiana, published in paperback (2024) by Seven Stories Press.

GARY INDIANA is a novelist and critic who has chronicled the despair and hysteria of America in the late twentieth century. From Horse Crazy (1989), 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, Indiana published his acclaimed anti-memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love and later the novel Gone Tomorrow. 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 remains both inimitable and impossible to pin down.

We mourn the loss of the poet Stanley Moss, who died last Friday at the age of 99. Stanley’s many books with Seven Stories over the decades depicted that most rare phenomenon, an alarming talent whose poetry just kept getting better. Almost Complete Poems, a monumental collection of all his work to date that Stanley curated with great care, won the 2016 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry. It was followed by Abandoned Poems (2018), Act V, Scene I (2020), Not Yet (2021) and Always Alwaysland (2021), collections of mostly new work written when he was 93, 95 and 96 years old, respectively, a truly astonishing testament to a man who found a way to rage against the dying of the light better than perhaps any poet before him. A writer’s writer, Stanley was also a book publisher of significance whose Sheep Meadow Press endures as an oasis for works of poetry by the likes of Yehuda Amichai, Hayden Carruth, David Ignatow, Stanley Kunitz, Rika Lesser, and Alberto Rios, among many others. Together with his wife Jane Moss and his son Tobia, we will long remember him and find joy in his poems.

—Dan Simon

Take 30% off all of our books through the end of July.  

To celebrate our publication of Victor Serge's 1925 classic manual, What Every Radical Should Know About State Repression, we are proud to share Dalia Hashad's introduction to the 2005 edition, in which Hashad connects the lessons of Serge's work with the socio-political crises within the United States in the early 2000s. Although written nearly 20 years ago, Hashad's introduction, like the 100 year-old text that follows it, is remarkably relevant in both its assessment of the era's political struggles and its analysis of the lessons one can take from past political movements. As you read it, consider the recent state and university crackdowns against student protestors and other pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist activists. The specter of fear as a tool of political repression is chillingly familiar to us in world increasingly threatened by totalitarianism.

“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

WHAT EVERY RADICAL SHOULD KNOW ABOUT STATE REPRESSION

INTRODUCTION TO THE 2005 EDITION

BY DALIA HASHAD

Last year, a friend and I were lamenting the lack of popular revolt at the current political situation in the United States. Government policies and practices changed drastically, significantly curtailing individual rights, but our citizenry remained largely complacent. As an example of how bad things have become, the government has asserted the power to hold any person, citizen or not, in indefinite detention, without access to the courts, without ever seeing a lawyer, their families, their friends or the press. For a so-called “enemy combatant” there is no trial, no hearing and no chance to challenge the charges or to even hear the charges at all, if they in fact exist. The president just has to point his finger at any person and they disappear, perhaps forever, into a legal black hole. He was holding hundreds of people in Guantánamo Bay and three on US soil in this manner. This is a “democratic” government, gone wild with power.

What is more surprising than the fact that the government had assumed the authority to jail anyone, indefinitely, without any semblance of due process, is the conspicuous absence of popular revolt at this shocking usurpation of power. While some organizations publicly register their dismay and people grumble about the unfairness at dinner parties, where is the mass outrage? Any one of us could now disappear, without a reason, without recourse, at the hands of our government. My friend shook his head, noting, “If all the McDonalds were shut down for one week, people would be in the streets in five minutes screaming about freedom. So few people actually get what’s happening. The rest are just sleeping. We have got to wake some folks up!” I realized that current events were retracing familiar patterns. Historically, fundamental change often begins with people on the margins shaking the heart of society into wakeful consciousness. There is a way.

People have been here before.

Victor Serge saw a central role for those who lived and thought on the margins. Giving me something to think about, he rejected the idea of a separateness of individuals, arguing “society has no fringe . . . no one is ever outside it, even in the depth of dungeons.”[1] In his lifetime, Serge saw his share of dungeons—figurative and literal. From birth, his radical parents and humble surroundings conspired to create in him an indefatigable revolutionary for whom it was self-evident that his life’s duty was “to ally [himself] with the exploited, and to work for the destruction of an intolerable system.”[2] His parents escaped czarist dictatorship and oppression in Russia and settled in Brussels, where Serge was born in 1890. He grew up in abject poverty, losing a brother to malnutrition.

His father, himself a scholar, detested the school system but encouraged learning. Serge became a student without a school, pursuing education in his father’s many books and with friends with whom he would digest and dissect ideas and theories. Seeking political reform, he immersed himself in diverse philosophies and carefully developed his own inspired ideas to which he devoted his life and which are woven throughout What Every Radical Should Know About State Repression. He learned early on that life “means, ‘Thou shalt think, thou shalt struggle, thou shalt be hungry’.” And perhaps more importantly, seemingly from the beginning, Serge was born with an irrepressible compulsion to obey an inner voice that instructed him: “Thou shalt fight back.”3 “In setting ‘the course on hope’,” writes Serge’s biographer Susan Weissman, “he pursued truth, struggled against privilege, and sought social justice and dignity. He chose to participate in the making of history by involving himself in the daily struggles of ordinary people. In Serge’s time, these struggles were heroic.”[4]

At great personal cost, Serge devoted his life to fighting back. Openly critical of authoritarianism and any manner of fascism, he spent more than a decade in various prisons, persecuted for his thoughts. As a man who translated his words into direct action, Serge’s activism for political reform was his single, lifetime career that took many forms: he was an editor, activist, poet, prisoner, machine gunner, commissar, historian, pamphleteer, novelist, writer, political commentator, translator and always, always a revolutionary. In his own words, Serge “sought to harness together personal transformation and revolutionary action, in accordance with the motto of Elisée Reclus: ‘As long as social injustice lasts we shall remain in a state of permanent revolution’.”[5] And for his lifetime, he did.

I have always been particularly moved by stories of marginalized individuals seeking political reform. Zapatistas fighting for dignity in the mountains of Chiapas, Palestinians refusing to surrender dignity to colonial occupation, and the muted, lesser-known struggles of people quietly plugging away for political change, all capture my attention. They are emblematic of a process whose foundation is often slowly constructed over the course of patient years. They are people who want what every human being wants: freedom and fairness, however they perceive it.

Recently, I’ve been consumed by the struggle in my own country. In the United States, the past few years mark a historic period that few people anticipated. It is no longer safe to express your political opinion. Just last month, I provided legal services to a man visited at his home by the FBI who demanded an interview because he was critical of US foreign policy in the Middle East. Justified by the events of September 11, 2001, it was one of hundreds of cases I deal with in the widespread disintegration of civil liberties.

Historical perspective is often lost under the weight of the current resistance. Reading Serge is a comforting reminder that the struggle against various forms of repression is an ongoing one, fought over the entire course of history. Realizing that the search for a better political system is timeless, we can draw on the past, to fight our way through this dark period to something better. It is, at the same time, chilling and reassuring to read What Every Radical Should Know About State Repression. Written almost eighty years ago, it mirrors our present situation.

Using the threat of “terrorism” as cover, the US government assumed unchecked powers and adopted draconian policy emblematic of totalitarian governments. The rapid crumbling of laws that took place over months and short years was accompanied by the erection of a new “evil.” US government policy, simplistically painting Muslims and Arabs as inherently wicked, paved the way for a strong resurgence of secret arrests and detentions, the use of torture as a tool of interrogation, the creation of a spy network, unchecked government surveillance and the widespread suppression of dissent—all discussed at length in Serge’s text.

Serge’s broad discussion on oft-recycled tools of state repression is as relevant today as it was yesterday. Upon reading Serge’s section on police used to infiltrate and disrupt resistance groups, I immediately recalled the California policeman, Aaron Kilner, who took a false name to infiltrate a peace group two years ago. His identity was revealed only after he died in a motorcycle accident and members of the peace group read his obituary, accompanied with photograph, in the newspaper.

When I finished reading Serge’s examination of government external surveillance of “suspicious” individuals, I reread a recent newspaper article about the US administration’s latest initiative to conduct “external—even obvious” surveillance of individuals suspected of being “sympathetic to terrorists.” Accordingly, the FBI has been chasing Muslims, Arabs and environmentalists. The placement of informers among prisoners reminds me of reports I’ve had from individuals in the criminal justice system who have been blackmailed into spying for law enforcement. The government’s plan to use average citizens as agents to spy on people, the use of torture and the collection of information on private individuals are all discussed in Serge’s text. The table of contents reads like a list of present-day offenses committed by the US administration. The current administration has, no doubt, learned a thing or two from other repressive governments. They are recycling, not inventing, many of these techniques. Things have happened here that US citizens only believe occur in other countries. After 9/11, the United States has violated both the law and the fundamental moral responsibility of any state by rounding up, detaining and deporting Muslim and Arab men, not because they had any connection to terrorist activity, but because they had the wrong religion or came from the wrong country. Even when there was no evidence that people had engaged in criminal activity, the government that held itself out as an international beacon of democratic due process secretly detained and summarily deported men because of their religion. In the middle of the night, FBI and immigration agents burst through doors and dragged people from their beds, terrifying families, neighborhoods and communities. No one could understand why and how people were being targeted or who might be the next to disappear into federal custody. At a recent public hearing, some victims of government repression told their stories. One young Syrian-American woman told of her family’s experience with an early-morning raid in Seattle, Washington:

At 6 o’clock in the morning about 15 police banged on our door. I was in my bedroom, asleep. I got up, and I’m standing in the hallway with the lights off. I keep hearing yelling. Two officers came downstairs with the lights in the hallway still off. When one of the officers and I were face to face, I scared him. So he pulls his gun, and all I know it’s in the middle of my forehead. I threw my hands up. He asked me whom I was with, and I told him my little sister, please don’t hurt her. He orders me to go upstairs and sit with my family. I see my father’s frightened face and my little brother sitting on the couch. My dad tells me that they won’t let my mom cover up. I knew I had been hearing an argument. I looked in my parents’ room, and one of the agents was yelling at her. Asking her if she had a gun under her pillow, is that why she wasn’t getting up? Or if she was naked, then she needs to get up right now and get dressed and he’s not leaving her side. He was pointing his gun and flashlight at her face. She kept arguing with him. All she wanted to do was cover herself. My father was handcuffed like a criminal.[6]

Curiously, this young woman’s story sounded almost identical to that of another woman testifying, at the same forum, of a similar raid that took place in the same city, fifty years earlier. A Japanese-American woman, a former prisoner of war interned by the US government during World War II, told her harrowing account with fresh emotion:

My father was picked up by FBI agents and four Seattle policemen. It was the same day as my eldest sister’s 11th birthday. In the early morning hours, the men pounded on the door, pushed aside my mother and invaded the house. They woke my father from his sleep, ordered him to dress and take care of his morning toiletries, all under strict observation by one of the officers. Meanwhile, agents searched throughout the house, ransacking closets, going through drawers and cupboards, only once giving an indication of what they were looking for. They did ask my sister if father owned “one of these” showing her his gun. To this day, she recalls her emphatic response of “No” as she watched in repulsed silence as one of the men sifted his hands through the sugar canister and rice container. When they left, taking my father with them, the house was in chaos. It was one of two times I ever saw my mother cry.[7]

The presentations were disturbing not just for the individual and collective experiences that they reflect, but because they had happened almost exactly fifty years apart and yet the stories were practically identical. Like many activists, I functioned under the assumption that as a collective human society, we were always, almost inevitably, improving. Progress was synonymous with the passage of time and those working for social change would have increased measures of success. But the stories of current victims of government repression, sounding almost identical to victims from decades past belied the idea that trajectory of change forever leaned towards progress and enlightenment.

“Repression,” Serge comments, “can really only live off fear.” But that is not the end of the matter as he goes on to ask: “But is fear enough to remove need, thirst for justice, intelligence, reason, idealism—all those revolutionary forces that express the formidable, profound impulse of the economic factors of a revolution? 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.”

After recent political setbacks, many people, hoping and working for serious change, had a “wake-up” call. Instead of decreasing, one after another, new tools of repression made their way into our daily lives. Activists began to look at the struggle with new appreciation for its length and breadth. The realization is dawning on many that this is not short-term resistance. In the words of a colleague, this is a marathon, not a sprint and we need to prepare for it. Serge was in it for the long haul, understanding the enduring demands of serious political reform. As many activists change their tactics and views of their work, Serge becomes ever more relevant. An intellectual and activist, he lived and thought optimistically. His friend Julian Gorkín called him an “eternal vagabond in search of the ideal.” And in these days, as we are bound to suffer losses and falter, Serge has something timeless to teach and inspire us:

Our mistakes were honorable. And even from a point of view less absurdly exalted, we were not so wrong. There is more falsification of ideas now than real confusion, and it is our own discoveries that are falsified. I feel humiliated only for the people who despair because we have been defeated. What is more natural and inevitable than to be beaten, to fail a hundred times, a thousand times, before succeeding? How many times does a child fall before he learns to walk? . . . The main thing is to have strong nerves, everything depends on that. And lucidity . . . Human destiny will brighten.[8]

Dalia Hashad
New York, 2005

We're delighted to participate in the 4th annual #ReadTheWorld bookfair, an online festival celebrating translation publishers, translators, and translation at large, organized by our friends at American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).

To mark the occasion, we're discounting all of our books in translation by 25% off through May 21st! Scroll down for curated lists, or click here to explore all books in translation.

Hailing from Croatia and Poland, our two latest literary fiction releases, in their own ways, explore isolation and captivity, memory and legacy. The first of the two, Sons, Daughters by Ivana Bodrožić, deftly translated into English by Ellen Elias-Bursać, is a novel about being locked in: socially, domestically, and intimately, told through three different perspectives, all affected by the patriarchy in their own way. In the second, Antona Lloyd-Jones' stunning translation of Dr. Josef’s Little Beauty by Zyta Rudzka, twin sisters, Leokadia and Helena, living together in a retirement home not far from Warsaw, reflect on their childhoods spent in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany.

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 trans man and a cis 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.

A daughter is paralyzed after a car crash, left without the ability to speak, trapped in a hospital bed, unable to move anything but her eyes. Although she is immobilized, her mind reels, moving through time, her memories a salve and a burden. A son is stuck in a body that he doesn’t feel is his own. He endures misperceptions and abuse on the way to becoming who he truly is. A mother who grew up being told she was never good enough, in a world with no place for the desires and choices of women. She carries with her the burden of generations.

These three stories run parallel and intertwine. Three voices deepen and give perspective to one another’s truth, pain, and struggle to survive.

A Holocaust story as fascinating and compelling as it is terrifying and puzzling — a book about aging and war crimes, pain, and pride.

In the middle of summer, omnipresent heat radiates as a group of elderly people are remembering their youth. The story focuses on two twin sisters, Leokadia and Helena, who live together in a retirement home not far from Warsaw. These are not ordinary stories they are sharing, because both of them spent time as children in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. At the center is Helena, who at the age of 12 was saved from extermination by 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.

This is a story both provocative and disturbing about the fear that lingers in victims. Was the sisters’ relationship with the executioner a desperate attempt to save their lives, or perhaps they harbor a hideous pride and sense of superiority over other prisoners? Rudzka’s extraordinary writing turns unsettling questions about memory and survival into art.

Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein

Paul Auster: In Remembrance

Paul Auster roamed the plains of American letters, producing works ranging from experimental to commercial fiction, every book something completely new, never repeating himself, producing a half-century of significant contributions, one after another. It would be impossible to conceive of contemporary American literature without him. Truly one of the greats of his generation—a poet and translator turned memoirist and novelist—always hungry to expand the boundaries of what a book can be. Not least, he bridged the cultures of Big and Independent publishing. His last book, Baumgartner, from the independent publisher Grove, is a strong novel, not at all a book you’d think could have been written by a sick man, although Paul was already very sick with cancer when he wrote it. The Invention of Solitude, his first book, is certainly one of the towering works of the second half of the 20th century—there’s never been a debut like it.

We published Paul’s A Life in Words, a book-length series of conversations with a Danish academic, I.B. Siegumfeldt, who specializes in Paul Auster studies. It has him telling the story of each of his books from The Invention of Solitude (1982) to Sunset Park (2010).

Paul was someone who talked to you on the phone, not via email. He would call, and you could call him. For most of the years I knew him, he didn’t have an assistant. He embodied all that makes American writing so particular, the savage grace that grows from us still being a young frontier country after all. We will always miss him now.

—Dan Simon for Seven Stories Press
 

 

To mark the publication of We Live Here, a graphic biography of Detroit Eviction Defense written by Jeffrey Wilson and illustrated by Bambi Kramer, we are proud to share Wilson’s introductory note, in which he offers a history of housing in Detroit and the specific methods that banks, corporations, and collections agencies work to evict or otherwise displace longterm residents.

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SOLIDARITY AND HOME DEFENSE
THE CASE OF DETROIT

By Jeffrey Wilson

This comic centers on the fourth anniversary celebration of Detroit Eviction Defense (DED). During the festivities, members recounted their stories fighting housing dispossession. In doing so, they offer a model of place-based struggle that has won some eighty homes back from the brink of eviction. Emerging out of the Occupy Movement of 2011, DED is a grassroots coalition of homeowners, anarchists, faith-based activists, union members, and community advocates. To understand DED’s strategies, it is helpful to have a clear picture of the city’s housing history and modes of eviction. 

DISPOSSESSION BY THE NUMBERS 

Housing displacement in Detroit typically takes two forms: mortgage and/or tax foreclosure. A mortgage foreclosure happens when a financial institution takes possession of a property for nonpayment and is the central focus of this book. Tax foreclosure, detailed in the appendix, is when the local municipality takes possession of a property for three consecutive years of nonpayment and subsequently auctions the house, more often than not to real estate speculators. 

Between 2005–2013 Detroit recorded nearly 70,000 mortgage foreclosures impacting approximately 30 percent of residential properties (Akers & Seymour, 2019). One activist describes these mortgage foreclosures and the subsequent fallout as a “hurricane without water” (Interview, 2016). The sentiment seems correct and the problem grows significantly when taking mortgage and tax foreclosures together. Between 2005 and 2015, 1 in 3 properties in the city faced either a mortgage or tax foreclosure (Kurth, 2015). Approximately 160,000 foreclosures were executed, impacting 120,000 homes or 48 percent of all residential properties. Of these homes, 27,000 experienced a kind of double dispossession of a mortgage foreclosure and then a tax foreclosure (Akers & Seymour, 2019).

While mortgage foreclosures have devastated individual families, some of these properties also cost the city millions. As the Detroit News reported, nearly 56 percent of these mortgage-foreclosed homes were in some state of disrepair as of 2015, with nearly 13,000 slated for demolition, costing Detroit $200 million (Kurth, 2015). 

Mortgage foreclosures in Detroit are not isolated, but are built upon a frenzy of subprime lending. In the four years leading up to the housing market crash of 2008, nearly $4 billion in predatory loans was injected into the city’s housing market. Such lending practices are a contemporary iteration of what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has termed “predatory inclusion.” The fair housing era facilitated more robust access to the housing market for many African Americans. Yet this was not the end of discrimination or segregation. Black people continued to pay exorbitant rates and face unequal terms for housing that was often of substandard quality, as Taylor comments. This inclusion was another way that “Black bodies become vessels through which racial capital extracts value” (Denvir, 2020). Detroit before the 2008 market crash is a reminder of the impacts of predatory inclusion. While subprime lending averaged 24 percent of the national market, a kind of predatory inclusion drove rates in Detroit to an average 68 percent in 2005. In some targeted neighborhoods this number rose to 80 percent of all mortgages (Kurth & MacDonald, 2015). 

While the pre-2008 mortgage regime produced inclusionary practices, the post housing market crash strengthened exclusionary practices. A Bridge Michigan analysis of mortgages found that in 2007 African Americans received 75 percent of mortgage loans in Detroit but by 2017 this decreased to 48 percent, despite the fact that Black people make up nearly 80 percent of the city's population. White people comprised only 10 percent of Detroit’s population but received 17 percent of loans in 2007 and 58 percent in 2017. Several Detroit neighborhoods, which had once generated 600 mortgages in 2007, produced zero in 2017 (Wilkinson, 2019). Homes are still being purchased in Detroit, but for many residents nontraditional and much riskier arrangements such as land contracts or rent-to-own are the only avenues for homeownership. Housing advocates estimate that 1 in 10 evictions result from land contracts, yet these numbers might be much higher as such agreements are not required to be registered by the city (Einhorn & Mondry, 2021).

The waning of mortgage foreclosures by the mid-2010s was followed by a series of catastrophic tax foreclosures. Approximately 100,000 tax foreclosures were triggered in the city between 2011 and 2015 (Atuahene, 2020). The peak was 24,793 foreclosures occurring in 2015 (Aguilar, 2020). In tax foreclosure, homes that are behind three years are then sent to tax auction. These auctions have moved online since 2015, facilitating speculators from around the world in buying properties in Detroit, as the appendix of this book outlines. 

Tax foreclosure as dispossession is only part of the story. Wayne County now leverages Detroit’s tax debt to make a profit. The City of Detroit is paid annually for an individual’s delinquent taxes by Wayne County. Essentially this makes it so that Detroit does not have unpaid taxes on the ledger. In order to lend Detroit this money, the county borrows annually from individual investors or banks. To pay off these loans Wayne County then collects unpaid property taxes from delinquent Detroit homeowners, charging them an additional 4 percent interest rate or higher. As Bridge Magazine notes, “profit [for the county] comes from borrowing at 5 percent or less and getting up to 22-percent return on delinquent taxes, creating the surplus controlled by the county treasurer.” Key to this is that the largely white suburbs get to control the surplus generated from Black residents of Detroit. The article continues by noting, “in 2004, Wayne County began to collect Detroit’s delinquent taxes, doubling the county’s surplus of fees and interest from delinquent taxes to an average of $33 million from $15 million per year” (Kurth et al., 2017). 

As a consequence, Detroit, once a city known as a center of Black homeownership, has shifted from a city in which homeowners were the majority to a city in which renters are the majority. The housing stock now has 124,000 owned units and 140,000 rentals (Ruggiero et al., 2020). Coupled with the pandemic, this shift has placed struggles against housing dispossession on different footing. At the forefront now are tenant rights. 

WE LIVE HERE: DETROIT EVICTION DEFENSE 

This book is a celebration of place-based struggle against the forces of dispossession outlined above. Recounted are stories by Detroiters, primarily Black women, who fought and organized to save their homes from a mortgage foreclosure. Together with local activist group DED, these women answer the question “what will Detroit look like in the future?” by asserting that “there is no Detroit without us!” Told in eight chapters, families who have lived in the city for generations detail their deeply personal stories of falling behind on mortgage payments, going through the eviction process, and fighting to keep their homes. In doing so, these stories work against the unexamined assumption that foreclosures are caused by individual irresponsibility. As each family discusses their particular situation, this idea is upended and we can discern that it is not individual fault but rather the contours of racial capitalism that usurp Black and Latinx wealth. While each story has its own particular points of emphasis, the heart of this book is about transformation, resistance, and solidarity in the face of housing loss. 

These stories contradict a popular image of the city as a kind of blank canvas. A canvas to be painted as a collection of cheap properties that entice real estate speculators from around the world, as a creative playground for artists or a landscape for billionaires to resculpt downtown, and as a spot for suburban tourists. Tying these activities together is a view of the city as a functionally empty frontier in need of resettlement. Yet beyond these conventional players in urban growth and development are groups like DED that expand our ability to imagine possible resistances to the future of housing implicit in these exploitative visions. 

Central to DED’s work are direct action tactics to keep Detroiters in their homes. This ranges from physically stopping bailiffs from entering and evicting families to strategies such as packing the courtroom with DED members during eviction hearings. These tactics emerge from DED’s broader organizing, in which homeowners build support in their neighborhoods to mount a defense against eviction. Those facing an impending eviction are urged by DED to go to family, friends, and neighbors to let them know their situation in order to build support for a home defense. 

These acts are not insignificant. People facing eviction often feel ashamed and these moments of community building around dinner tables or in church halls creates the solidarity that is necessary to save a home. 

In solidarity with the pro-Palestine student actions at Columbia University, NYU, University of California Berkeley, University of Minnesota, MIT, Harvard, Yale, and many other universities throughout the country, we are proud to offer free downloads of Student Resistance in the Age of Chaos by Mark Edelman Boren.

A sweeping, two-volume recent history of student protest, Student Resistance in the Age of Chaos not only highlights successful resistance students movements of the past 20+ years, but also examines the ways that new technologies further enable direct actions and other tactics for resistance to administrative and police repression.

As Mark Boren writes, "Student resistance throws into relief the relationships within our societies between the rulers and the people. It defines cultural moments and indicates the directions in which nations are heading. And if student activism has a rich and storied past, it is just as true that student movements are shaping the world more than they ever have before. ... The explosion of protests in the world has shown us that there are millions of people — many of them young and altruistic — who are willing to stand up to forces of oppression, to risk their bodies, their freedom, and their lives to make the future better than the past, and that is humbling, inspiring, and hopeful for the future."

Student resistance in the first decade of the 21st century was the single most powerful liberating force around the globe during those years. Challenging governments—in a few cases, overturning governments—at a time when representational democracies appeared weak and authoritarian regimes were on the rise. In Student Resistance in the Age of Chaos, Book 1, Mark Boren goes continent by continent, country by country, to show us the contours of the new frontlines of resistance, the sacrifices that were made, the seismic changes caused by the Internet, and the new powers of surveillance and military technology that governments across the globe used to monitor and suppress student groups, raising the stakes and the human cost of resistance in many countries.

Student resistance in the second decade of the 21st century has increased in both quantity and quality, supercharged by social media, to the point where it has become the single most powerful force for change in the world today, embodying the hopes of hundreds of millions of citizens to finally address climate change, the condition of women and other major issues. Student resistance movements are the vanguard that can jumpstart wider social movements that put governments on notice at a time when corruption and stagnation plague democracies and authoritarian regimes alike. In Student Resistance in the Age of Chaos, Book 2, Mark Boren details the increasing technological sophistication of student movements, as the stakes continue to rise and the movements grow ever larger. With 1.5 billion students in the world, student activists today use technology to turn local movements into national and international ones. Armed with sophisticated communications and cell phone cameras to record police violence, linked to websites for broadcasting and encrypted apps for privacy, today's student activists have already done much to stop genocide and ensure government reform or regime change in scores of countries. 

Greg Ruggiero, one of America’s top editors of leftist nonfiction, returned in November 2023 to Seven Stories Press, where he began his career in book publishing.

Ruggiero started out as a pamphleteer, hawking works by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky from street corners with his cohort Stuart Sahulka. Together, they founded Open Magazine and, in 1991, the Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, publishing, among many others, Edward Said, Loretta Ross, Manning Marable, Mike Davis, Thomas Frank, The United Nations, and the Dalai Lama.

In 1998, he partnered with Seven Stories Press to create the Open Media series, which pioneered a new kind of political pamphlet in book form, most notably Noam Chomsky’s 9-11 and Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?, but also works from less well-known authors, such as Tanya Reinhardt's Israel/Palestine.

Ruggiero was also co-editor, with Juana Ponce de Leon, of Our Word Is Our Weapon, the collected writings of Subcommandante Marcos, released in 2000. While in Chiapas, Mexico, working on that book, he was detained and interrogated, and given a week to leave the country.

In 2005, he left Seven Stories, moving to City Lights in early 2006. At City Lights his notable publications include The Black History of the White House by Clarence Lusane, and a new edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with lecture notes by Angela Davis. After 17 years, Ruggiero left City Lights in 2023. 

His first acquisition for Seven Stories was MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade’s Attack from Within, which hit regional and national bestseller lists in its first week of sales in February 2024. Subsequent acquisitions include Talking About Abolition by Sonali Kolhatkar (January 2025), Reversing the Pipeline: Black Boarding Schools and Mass Incarceration by Tamar Sarai, Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth by Stan Cox, Todd Miller’s Dammed: Climate Change, Borders, and the Emerging Water Wars, and From Gaza to Paradise by Ramzy Baroud.

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For further information:
Ruth Weiner
Seven Stories Press
914-309-8570
ruth@sevenstories.com