To celebrate the publication of The Absolute,Daniel Guebel’s English debut, we are proud to share Jessica Sequeira’s compelling Translator's Note, in which she breaks down the process, the complexities, and the joys of translating this multi-faceted novel, and rendering into English the many metaphors, layered references, and stylistic choices employed by Guebel.
Winner of Premio Municipal de la Novela, 2021
Winner of Premio Nacional de Literatura Argentina, 2018
Winner of Premio Literario de la Academia Argentina de Letras, 2017
Winner of Best Novel Award by La Nación, 2016
Approaching the Absolute
Daniel Guebel’s The Absolute is structured as six books that move from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century and recount a family’s secret interventions in music, mysticism and revolutionary thought over the course of history. The reader meets with:
1: Frantisek Deliuskin, a libertine who experiments with the sensations of women to write a musical composition;
2: Andrei Deliuskin, a seeker disillusioned by love, who makes an annotated copy of the Spiritual Exercises of the Jesuit Ignatius of Loyola, later read by Vladimir Lenin and applied to politics, then joins Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egypt campaign, where he seeks to decipher the Rosetta stone;
3: Esau Deliuskin, a political revolutionary who, after failing to assassinate the archduke Franz Ferdinand, is locked in a desert jail, where he engages in power games with his captor, breaks free and organizes a new society;
4: Alexander Scriabin, the famous Russian pianist, who works for Madame Helena Blavatsky (a Russian writer who cofounded the Theosophical Society of esoteric philosophy, which draws from Hinduism, Buddhism and Neoplatonism) and studies the teachings of Pythagoras, preceding his discovery of the mystic chord and his drafting of an unfinished symphonic masterpiece, the Mysterium;
5: Sebastian Deliuskin, the twin brother of Scriabin, separated from him in childhood, who reaches Argentina by ship and becomes a minor pianist in the provinces — as lovingly described by Sebastian’s daughter, the narrator of the entire book, interested in probing her family’s history;
6: the daughter’s ten-year-old son, a kid who builds a time machine in search of immortality.
Each figure engages in obsessive, absurd acts that might be genius or madness, indistinguishable as they exist in a process in which one finds oneself and thus cannot objectively know; deemed one or the other by those who control a narrative, they remain somehow both and neither, wave-particle duality forever uncertain. In other words, free. Countless minor characters also appear, intersecting with these stories yet spinning out on their own trajectories that suggest infinite parallel narratives.
A book called The Absolute is destined for evocative incompleteness. What an attractive concept, but also — what an absurd attempt to take it on! To do so, one must be comfortable with the notion of a productive defeat. What is success? And in any case, can’t the ill-fated striving to connect to an “absolute” nevertheless itself be art? Guebel’s work draws attention to its status as a failed project, and is self-aware and humorous about this in a Jewish tradition. The capricious and suggestive cut may always fall short of a true Absolute, yet there need not be anything melancholy about failure. The very effort is a joyful throwing of oneself into the world, a taking up of everything at hand not just to capture life but to create it, within and through words.
Although the book contains an overwhelming amount of “stuff,” it is never mere information. As the pages turn, there are both unfurlings and fallings short, moments of development and moments of rupture, mostly unanticipated. These change the course of self and society. Failure is as much a part of the personal and historical journey as success; Guebel is fascinated by the overly ambitious plans that end in unforeseen catastrophes and lead to new beginnings, leaving an object as testament.
Pluck the daisy petals: madman, genius, madman, genius. What seems to be bad, stupid, misguided, offensive or erroneous turns out, at a different historical moment, to be — instead or also — beautiful, intelligent, creative, visionary and avant-garde. How can one know which is which? Is there a greater reason or divine force behind our activity that keeps the wheel turning in revolutions? A vibration, perhaps? Here readers knock against a great, perhaps unknowable, philosophical question. In the meantime, Guebel narrates, and through his attention to detail and the stories of his individual characters, his work traces out a larger arc of events, both human and cosmic.
It’s possible a reader will pick up a title like this one with some trepidation, as I did at first and perhaps still do, even after having spent a number of months with its pages. Yet what most astonishes me — and the book has much that astonishes — is its sensuous approach to the abstract. Every character or episode along the way seems insignificant when viewed up close, yet is a luminous and self-contained unit. And when viewed from a different temporal perspective, each of these units is shot through with the whole. Whatever its spiritual or cosmic forays, Guebel’s book always continues to see, hear, smell, touch, taste. Forgive me if I put this in insufferable terms: The Absolute is an absolute of absolutes, but never forgets it has five (or more) senses.
History’s scope is suggested here, but also boldly embodied in style and language, which unceasingly change. The sensual is rationalized and the abstract incarnated, while time seems to move in not progressive but spiral form, plunging forward yet forever turning toward an echo of the same. An eternal return — until cataclysm breaks the account, yet again, into further multiplicities. The single narrative of philosophical history is shattered into literature. What other work has done something like this? Here one can find views from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, set out not by a historian with today’s perspective but portrayed through the eyes of characters themselves in a stylistic free indirect discourse. The line between not only life and literature, but also history and literature, blurs and melts away.
As translator, it now feels strange to deliver up this absolute book — one that is philosophical, political, historical, literary, sentimental, erotic, religious, scientific and artistic — to the usual cycles of publication and criticism. It asks for so much more than that: a fuller interrogation, a deeper consideration. The salvation of the universe. Those who wish to go straight to “the thing in itself ” are welcome, but if you’ve got a moment (or have already finished reading), I’d like to share a few thoughts — smaller infinities based on concrete objects, tangible ways I’ve found into this immensity, stylistic aspects that startled me into thinking.
Egg (Philosophy)
The egg on the cover is a symbol of the absolute, both contained whole and origin. (Which came first . . .) A single detail — for instance, an immigrant grandmother’s pronunciation of “boiled egg” as “bodeg” — can contain infinite stories. The concept of the absolute is rooted in a paradoxical desire to encompass an abstract totality, yet simultaneously refer to each unique part. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel developed this in his version of idealism. Every possible being is fully itself yet dissolves into nothingness when contextualized in the greater whole of the Absolute Spirit. Through the use of reason, I, me, the ego, the subject, comes to know an object and acts. For Hegel, History was the unfolding of a universal Reason led by great men such as Napoleon. The Absolute Spirit is the perfection of this logic, the infinite self-conscious sum of being.
Or could one think of this another way, from different philosophical traditions? I and Other, Son and Father, Nature and Spirit, Atman and Brahman — each pair may be intimately related, as both recipient and wellspring; and ultimately the duality of these pairs or complements may prove to be illusory, a non-duality.
Guebel, as a novelist, avoids the hairsplitting, book-swallowing speculations of the halls of Jena or the rishi’s ashram. But his characters and their actions give body to ideas and suggest new theories.
Magazine Page (Eroticism)
Guebel explores an array of erotic practices in intimate situations, from temporary infatuations to long-term partnerships, sadomasochist encounters to tender friendships, lesbian relationships to heterosexual marriages. Only a few pages in, the reader is treated to a description of how a libertine great-great-grandfather “composed” his musical masterpiece on the basis of the reactions of female bodies. Nowadays this might make for uncomfortable reading, but it would be a shame to stop there.
For this account — set in the eighteenth century — is very much in tune with the refined chronicles of scandal and treatises of eroticism by writers such as Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Denis Diderot and Marquis de Sade, read all over Europe in their time. There is curiosity but no cruelty in Guebel’s account, and the whole section is a tongue-in-cheek version of the Marquis de Sade’s excess rationalism, in which the sexual act is obscured by a too logical attention given to poses and variations.
More importantly, Guebel’s work, moving chronologically through history, adopts the tastes and styles of the people he describes, even if they’re no longer “appropriate” from today’s perspective. The reader may experience heady moments when coming across — in the very same set of pages — attitudes they consider barbaric, excessively rational, illuminated, disquieting or unfamiliar. Guebel’s scandal is not conscious of itself in each scene, but is so within the context of the work. While a negative reaction to certain passages might be understandable, this disgust or repulsion, too, forms a part of the book’s fascination. We are not in the realm of the safe and correct, and all seven of the traditional Catholic deadly sins are represented. If some parts are offensive to contemporary readers, that’s because much of history is also offensive from today’s perch. But to lose such “outdated” views, and the language that encrypts them, would also be to lose the history of ideas, the history of failures, the history of History.
Sex appears often in these pages — incarnated for a variety of tastes — but the real eroticism in Guebel’s work is his tender description of sensual being in the world through noticing. The pleasure is in the anticipation, and all the characters of the Deliuskin family hold dreams in their heads that make them savor what’s around them, from a listing of edible delicacies at a country lunch spot, to ink leakages through the transparent pages of a magazine that inspire fantasies of Eva Perón. Often this attention is more satisfying than the final outcome, if it comes into existence at all. Imagination and the processes of creation are ultimately erotic, beyond the result — there’s eroticism even in failure, if the ideas are caressed well enough along the way.
Talking Fish (Religion)
For Guebel, religion is based in the belief that all people and events are connected at the deepest level. The scenes slide from situation to situation, person to person, in absurd yet flowing transitions. Characters are sui generis personalities — again, thanks largely to the deft use of free indirect discourse — yet they form part of the same story, or historia. Shards from the same luminous whole.
The Kabbalah is important: Guebel’s Jewishness is in the tradition of Kafka and Babel, and like his admired Borges, he always seeks the Aleph. A deep mysticism, the direct relationship between self and the absolute, is achieved by characters through an extraordinary variety of experiences, from the discovery of a talking fish by a shopkeeper in Finland, to the annotation of a Catholic manuscript, to the practical savvy of a Jesuit priest who advises Lenin, to the doubt-filled grappling of a mother unsure her story bears meaning, to the stubborn proofs of love by a young boy who builds a machine to launch into the absolute silence of the cosmos. And every fragmented part in this broken, impure world is a gleaming spark of a fractured totality.
The Jesuits play a key role too, for they are the enactors of abstract religious ideas and secret agents of history, an ideal combination of the spiritual and the practical. Ideally, the order is focused on helping others, and on seeking the divine where it is not obviously to be found. Yet its probabilistic sophistries are also able — flexibly, hilariously, dangerously — to justify about anything.
Japanese Battleship (History)
History is always a narrative, after all. This is a book about everything, but it focuses on the lived stories of a few beings. In Borges’s anecdote “On Rigor in Science,” a map is built of the same scale as a territory, but its obsessive level of detail is precisely what renders it useless. Mapping the world one-for-one as literature would be a similarly impossible project. One must select certain points that represent but also contain the absolute. Naturally, this requires techniques of exaggeration and caricature, selectiveness and a zoom lens, to condense and sharpen the narratives, which — like Borges’s map — would otherwise suffer from an unwieldy excess of information. Or as Georges Canguilhem put it, “Often a caricature reveals the essence of a form better than a faithful copy.”
Napoleon, Lenin, Eva Perón, Rasputin, Madame Blavatsky — Guebel shows us these great figures as obsessive megalomaniacs, eccentrics with foibles, well-situated actors on the “world stage.” A writer can make us see someone we think we know with fresh eyes. Ricardo Piglia, through an essay, made Che Guevara famous as a reader as well as a guerrilla. Guebel, through his imaginary reconstructions, indelibly alters how we think of such “greats.”
At the same time, he recounts a generational family history — a history of lesser-known figures with scattered ambitions, poorly placed or ignored, yet equally important to the story. And he recounts the story of the physical objects — books, bones, boxes, battleships — that shift the course of history as much as any human might.
Pyramid of Acrobats (Politics)
The absolute turns with ease into absolute power, the supreme God or dictator, the international trafficking of senselessness. Napoleon, on a whim, commands that a man be enclosed in a sarcophagus and sent as a spy to France, and that a pyramid of acrobats be ordered from this same France to stand still as long as possible. In parallel he conducts active maneuvers intended to prove his love for Joséphine and along the way conquer Egypt, with no better results; politics comes to seem a farce of personal passions and idealistic obsessions, with “action” the amoral conduit toward this or that fantasy.
Karl Marx famously criticized Hegel for his philosophy of absolute knowledge with a self-conscious, estranged mind that abstractly comprehends itself. For Marx, this was yet another form of alienation, given that “man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being full of natural vigor” with “real, sensuous objects as the object of his being or life.” Marx emphasized action upon the material things around us, and change undertaken not just by self-proclaimed great men but by entire oppressed social classes. Yet such ideas have resulted in their own complications and tragedies.
For his part, Guebel parodies grand gestures of both intentionality and action, which casting toward new visions of past or future, trample with oblivious violence through the present. The Absolute is an extended critique of the saying “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” But it also knows eggs will inevitably break, and there might be nothingness within: the ovule of would-be genesis, leaving behind its shattered, beautiful shell.
Micropolitics is macro: any character of his, with the smallest unintentional gesture, and without realizing it, can produce outcomes as grand as floods, wars, peace, the alteration of perception. Genius, an “absolute” idea from Romanticism, here could find a twenty-first-century twist. If genius is the single-minded pursuit of self-realization, then perhaps the concept remains a vital one — should “self ” be capacious enough to contain alter egos and other people. Self-realization exists in infinite forms, and everything is bound to everything else. When the talking fish is cooked into a gefilte fish, sacredness is distributed throughout the community.
Note the supposed author of this book does not self-define as a genius, and although she suffers from doubts, she gets the work done. Individual geniuses burn fast and flame out, while perhaps those who create in a community are more like scribes, in the tradition of Kafka.
Ham-and-Tomato Sandwich (Sentimentality)
In an old notebook, I found scrawled a favorite line, by Rilke to his wife. It speaks of “we most changeable ones who walk about with the urge to comprehend everything, and (because we’re unable to grasp it) reduce immensity to the action of our heart, for fear that it might destroy us.” The Absolute is a great book because it is often a sentimental one, unafraid of emotions from love to jealousy to despair. The suffering of women and men, the close relationship of a boy with his grandmother (manifested through a loving description of the ham-and-tomato sandwiches she sat and ate with him), the heaviness of family expectations, the intensity of small affections, betrayals, sadnesses and loyalties, the importance of tenderness, faith and nostalgia — if “the Russian novel,” beyond its specific practitioners, has become shorthand for the expression of philosophy and human emotion in a big work of fiction, without fear of kitsch, then Guebel has written a Russian novel.
Rosetta Stone (Literature)
In The Literary Absolute, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy describe literature as “the production of its own theory” and a “poetics in which the subject confounds itself with its own production.” The Absolute is a novel that is fully aware of itself, and contains within it rewrites or parodies of almost every genre of novel, from the detective story to the adventure tale to the science fiction utopia. It abounds with aphorisms, the most condensed literary form, in which one line can allude to an entire unspoken tradition. Any “theory” in the book is embedded in its structure and infused in its stories, which are random yet coherent. Many mysterious signs are traced on the same stone for possible future decoding. Guebel himself has said in several interviews that the plots and preoccupations of all his previous novels are contained within this one.
The Absolute pays homage to specific writers, works and traditions, such as Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (Alexander Scriabin / Adrian Leverkühn), the Argentine movie El Fausto criollo (1979), Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (especially the Grand Inquisitor section), Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Lamborghini’s condensed writings, and Nabokov’s various tongue-tapping works, from Speak, Memory to — perhaps especially — Ada, or Ardor. From the latter there are not only moments quoted (such as the line “to leave is to die a little, to die is to leave a little too much,” in turn borrowed from Edmond Haraucourt), but also similar imaginaries like Anti-Earth, symbols and erotic episodes, as well as the broader theme of how a family might attempt to alter the Universe.
But, of course, this is a book chock-full of references, and looking for “influences,” versions or thefts in Guebel’s extended wink only gets you so far. What matters is how he transforms or transmogrifies them into his particular and moving style. Often lyrical, he is also fond of resources that poetically condense material, such as lists, anecdotes and jokes, as well as jack-in-the-box surprises and other forms of humor. Both the possible failures and the possible powers of literature are gloriously affirmed. As a writer, Guebel has been associated with the “Generación Babel,” which published the ’90s magazine Babel; while avoiding shock value for its own sake, the writers in this loose group did subscribe to the belief that no topic or style is off limits in writing if taken on with audacity, in the search for meaning.
Literature is ultimately a wager. The Absolute is composed by a mother writing a history of her family’s geniuses. By imagining their various attempts at mastery and entering into details, she discovers the specific luminosity of each life; she makes them geniuses. Yet this activity eats away at her own life. Are these biographies worth her soul? What is the value of her productions within art and eternity? Literature is a time machine, but it is also the great consumer of time.
Keyboard with Lights (Music)
While translating I listened constantly to the piano music of Alexander Scriabin, a character but also the theoretical impetus behind Guebel’s novel. Scriabin, a Russian composer and “tone poet,” was linked to theosophical ideas and practiced an exhilarating synesthesia on the basis of mathematical chord progressions. In his works for pianoforte — from the études to the sonatas to the preludes to the symphonies — notes clatter, crash and thunder in dissonant sonorities, not a continuous flow but a discrete overlap of sounds. Yet somehow this remains satisfying to the ear.
A couple of years ago, Scriabin’s notebooks were published by Oxford University Press, ecstatic declarations in Russian cursive that radiate freedom and bliss, torment and ecstasy. They do not touch earth, but remain high above in a mystic flight of the spirit, far from graspable material objects and tangible desires. There are no small moments of affection and humor; the senses are everything, but the body is missing. Only extremes reign, and a whole range of colors is absent from the palette. They are fascinating, yet I can live in his words for only a short time.
But his music — his music! His music is everything. It exalts, it melts ice blocks within you. What fatigues in literature intrigues in music. Scriabin aimed to play upon all the senses through his art, working with lights and sounds and colors to raise listeners to a higher plane of existence. To watch Glenn Gould play Scriabin’s chords, raising a hand up and then letting it drift slowly down, is, indeed, ecstasy . . .
The special piano — the tastiera per luce — that Scriabin invented does truly exist, as does the mystic chord, even if he died before they were put into action. Scriabin’s great project, to bring together humanity in a community through music and change the course of the planets and history, is perhaps the greatest failed project of the twentieth century, the awesome “what might have been.” Or perhaps its failure is an acknowledgment that we cannot realize the absolute in mediated fashion, and will forever stop just short of knowing.
Music, as many have argued, is the purest art; it does not allow for representation, for concept, for the intervention of language or image. Scriabin’s music does not seem abstract like this, however. It is more like literature, accessing fundamental ideas through superficial symbols, and through surfaces, colors, textures. Idea and substance. At its best, Guebel’s writing extends the project of Scriabin’s music, embodying a similar sensorial exaltation, lyrical yet avant-garde. It is art because of the intention and beauty of its process, but also as a created object — the work.
Time Machine (Science)
Guebel riffs on the “divine science” of theosophy, as well as on Pythagoreanism, doctors’ jargon, popular science, alternative medicine and astronomy. These are treated as sources of wonder, even as they are affectionately mocked. Science comprises not just theories derived from experimental data, but also theories that cannot be confirmed — fictional constructions, hypotheses, alternative proposed versions that burst open and expand current visions of the known to form new Wissenschafts, anti-systems, other ways to understand or organize the world. Science includes its own paradigmatic critique, and need not be reduced to a system. It does not progress in an obvious way, but continues to discover the essential in kaleidoscopic forms — just as in the last scene, we zoom both toward and away from the Big Bang, as ending becomes origin and the labyrinths, tunnels and wormholes that seemed so disparate connect via looping repetitions, constantly renewed.
Wormhole (Translation)
Is it possible to create a parallel work of art in another language, a wormhole from Spanish to English? The original novel is trying to act, do something, affect bodies and minds. Characters in the book dream of other lands, other forms of communication. The Absolute makes categories like the “national” or “global” novel seem miserly and all too human. Again, the reader comes back to the question of what literature can do. Often, while fiddling with this or that phrase, I thought of the entire translation as a mirror of Guebel’s. A parallel system of relations. Not a ghostly double but solid and material, neither more nor less true. Mirrors hold both horror and fascination, as “fulfillers of an ancient pact / to multiply the world,” as Borges put it. The espejo fiel, or faithful mirror, with its many significances of translation between worlds and texts, is at the heart of the Sephardic Jewish tradition. But faithfulness is an abstraction that can encompass nearly everything . . . Such were my thoughts as I engaged in the foolhardy task of “correcting the Absolute,” at least this translation.
For this is the kind of mirror that doesn’t just reflect and multiply, but lets one fall through to the other side. The word transido repeats throughout the book, and on one page we find the expression transido de escritura, racked by writing. Taking the meaning of rack as torture device, to be “racked” is to be “pierced through,” in agony or ecstasy. The path from writer to page to reader is a wormhole, especially with a mystical and marvelous writing that forges systems of correspondences with a passion for detail. The writer is racked, the reader is racked. But what kind of a wormhole is translation? Is there an absolute of language? How can one set of symbols be racked by or pierce through to another? Is a translation a second wormhole that bifurcates from the first, the creation of a parallel universe?
Two or More Absolutes
Throughout his book, Guebel plays with ways of thinking about the self and the whole found in both nineteenth-century European Romanticism, and in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. He also plays with Eastern settings in other novels; his latest is set in the world of Japanese samurai.
While differences between East and West are exaggerated and do not exist in any real sense anymore, if they ever did, perhaps the historically constructed dichotomies they represent still hold. This book flirts with two visions of the absolute, loosely mapping onto supposed Western and Eastern traditions. The Western Absolute is time, events as unfolding process, with changes and developments in the material tending toward an end (possibly utopia); it favors scientists and revolutionaries, and is ultimately self-creation. The Eastern Absolute is the negation of time, events as illusory succession, with changes and developments in the material unveiling themselves as non-reality that reverts to impersonal silence; it favors mystics and contemplatives, and is ultimately self-abnegation. To reconcile these two visions of the absolute seems impossible. Perhaps any attempt at unity is destined to fail. Or perhaps, just as there are false divisions between geographies, there is also a false division between what is now and what could be.
The Absolute is about building things that are imperfect and transitory — whether these be sculptures, musical works, political structures, poems, relationships or families — but whose effects continue to resound in the universe. Both creation and abnegation form a part of what’s made in practice, and theoretical contradictions cease to be so in the lived paradox of human experience.
Sometimes, when listening to a piece of extraordinary music — or reading an extraordinary novel — I feel myself poised on the brink of something between the physical and the mental, between reality and its negation. On the endlessly delicate, quivering line between This and That, an inviting abyss. Such a singularity, I tell myself, must be Art.
—Jessica Sequeira
DANIEL GUEBEL has published over twenty-five books, including novels, short stories and plays. He won Argentina’s National Literature Prize as well as the Argentine Academy of Letters’ novel prize. The Absolute was chosen by La Nación newspaper as its book of the year and The Emperor’s Pearl won the Emecé Prize. His autobiographical book The Jewish Son also won the Buenos Aires Book Fair’s award for literary criticism. Guebel’s latest novel is A Japanese Crime. A lover of Japanese literature, he owns a sushi restaurant.
JESSICA SEQUEIRA is a writer and literary translator. She is the author of the novel A Furious Oyster, the story collection Rhombus and Oval, the essay collection Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age and the hybrid work A Luminous History of the Palm. She has translated over twenty books by Latin American authors, and in 2019 was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán for her translation of Sara Gallardo’s Land of Smoke. She lives in Santiago, Chile and Cambridge, England.
If you ever had the astonishing experience of visiting Ed Young's studio, you know the awe of seeing such an unstoppable creative force at work. Every surface had a project in the works laying across it or hanging from it. Every lamp and chair back served a second role as prop for a drawing or home to an insect crafted from cut up old credit cards or a cardboard roll refashioned into a telegraphing contraption that told a story as it extended or a tiny paper roll that unfurled with Chinese characters so beautifully drawn it could make you cry. There was no end to the imagination percolating from Ed Young’s mind and spirit into the studio in his house in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Perhaps most mysterious and charming was the crawlspace one was encouraged to navigate—through the garage, up a ladder, through a trapdoor, to a secret, sunny space in the next building, where many of the projects he was working on entered the last stages and then completion. What a loss to us all that the wildly creative, wonderfully human Ed Young has died at the age of 92.
The renowned illustrator and writer of children's picture books was born on November 28, 1931, in Tientsin, China. As a young man he moved to the US, where he worked at an advertising agency before illustrating his first book, The Mean Mouse and Other Mean Stories, written by Janice May Urdry, in 1962. Since then he illustrated over eighty children's books, seventeen of which he also wrote. Throughout his long career he received over fifty awards and honors, including the Caldecott Medal in 1990 for Lon Po Po, his retelling of a Chinese version of "Little Red Riding Hood," and Caldecott Honors for The Emperor and the Kite (1967) and Seven Blind Mice (1992). He was nominated twice for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition given to children's book authors and illustrators for their contribution to children's literature. His books frequently drew on folklore from Chinese, Native American, Indian, Persian, and other cultures, and he used a variety of media, including pencil, pastel, ink, collage, cut paper, photographs, and found materials.
We had the pleasure of working with Ed on three books that he illustrated — one also written by him, one written by Barbara DaCosta, and one written by Mark Reibstein. Yugen shows, in few words and simple yet haunting black lines, the relationship of a small boy to his mother, who has gone away. Night Shadows features Ed's singular paper cutout art to tell the story of a young girl who finds companionship with her elderly neighbor. And in Voices of the Heart, Young used paint and paper art to explore twenty-six Chinese characters, each describing an emotion, and each containing somewhere the symbol for the heart.
All of his books feel deeply personal, and it's a salve to know that in them we have Ed Young with us always.
—Ruth Weiner
Publisher, Triangle Square Books for Young Readers
Director of Publicity, Seven Stories Press
October 1, 2023
Books by Ed Young
In this deeply personal book, artist and author Ed Young explores twenty-six Chinese characters, each describing a feeling or emotion, and each containing somewhere the symbol for the heart. He combines visual symbols of the West in the same manner the ancient Chinese used in composing their characters, focusing on characters that contain the heart symbol. The seal style of Chinese calligraphy that he employs is approximately 2,500 years old. Here it serves as a bridge between our contemporary selves and the most ancient Chinese pictures and symbols. Through stunning collage art that interprets the visual elements within each character, Young uncovers layers of emotional meaning for words such as joy and sorrow, respect and rudeness. He invites children to probe the full range of their own emotions, and gives parents, librarians, and older readers a context for discussing ethics and for examining the similarities and differences between old and new, East and West.
First published in 1997, the book is a truly unique exploration—or as Young writes, "adventure"—into the different moods, and dangers and abilities of the human heart—our emotional selves—to conjure and master, or fall victim to, the many challenges we face.
The third collaboration between Young and DaCosta tells the story of a lonely girl who finds an unlikely friend in her elderly neighbor.
Each night kids have been creeping around and spray painting houses in Tasha's neighborhood. Two days in a row, her neighbor Mrs. Lucy awakes to find graffiti outside her home. Tasha helps her paint over it. They discover that they are alike, except for their age, and become inseparable. But who keeps defacing Mrs. Lucy's house? Ed Young's inimitable cut-out art sensitively conveys the characters' emotions and the drama of the story: as the truth is discovered, the houses become multicolored, but the characters remain faceless. Then when the miscreants are revealed, Tasha's and Mrs. Lucy's faces become visible. A subtle expression of recognition on both... This nuanced story shows young readers that honesty and respect are the most important elements for friendship. With Night Shadows, Caldecott Medal-winner Ed Young's oneiric illustrations and Barbara DaCosta's introspective narrative jointly reproduce the intensity with which a child experiences solitude and companionship.
Yugen is the story of a boy remembering his mother, told in haiku and pictures, a book of longing and remembrance that is unequaled in its beauty and poetic simplicity. "Yugen" is not just a nickname for the main character, it is also a profound concept in Asian societies that points to the mystery and beauty of the universe and of human suffering. Yugen, the second collaboration between Caldecott-winning illustrator Ed Young and Mark Reibstein, after their award-winning 2008 debut, Wabi Sabi, beautifully captures a boy's sadness, but also his mindfulness and wonder.
To celebrate the publication of Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases / Stories and Poems of Class Struggle by Roque Dalton, translated from Spanish by Jack Hirschman and Barbara Paschke, we are proud to share a poem from the next, as well as Jaime Barba's introduction to the collection. In his introduction, Barba places this text, as well as other texts by Roque Dalton, within the larger political climates of Central America during the late 1960s and 1970s.
Tercer poema de amor
A quienes te digan que nuestro amor es extraordinario
porque ha nacido de circunstancias extraordinarias
diles que precisamente luchamos
para que un amor como el nuestro
(amor entre compañeros de combate)
llegue a ser en El Salvador
el amor más común y corriente,
casi el único.
Third Poem of Love
Whoever tells you our love is extraordinary
because it was born of extraordinary circumstances
tell them we’re struggling precisely
so that a love like ours
(a love among comrades in combat)
becomes the most ordinary and common
almost the only love
in El Salvador.
THE NEW WORD IS RISK
JAIME BARBA
Introduction to Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases / Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle
It is difficult to say whether Roque Dalton finished Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle in April 1975, since he was assassinated around May 10 of that year. It would be better to say that this collection of poems is truncated, like its author’s life.
Roque was already a well-known writer when he entered El Salvador clandestinely via the Ilopango International Airport of San Salvador, on December 24, 1973, under the name Julio Delfos Marín, to become a combatant in the People’s Revolutionary Army, one of the guerrilla organizations that began operations in the early 1970s.
The testimonial narrative Miguel Mármol: The events of 1932 in El Salvador [Miguel Mármol. Los sucesos de 1932 en El Salvador] had finally been published in Costa Rica at the end of 1972. This book was a milestone in the reconstruction of Salvadoran political history.
In January 1971, a preview of the book—chapters IV, VI, and VII—appeared in the journal Pensamiento Crítico in Havana and then in the magazine La Universidad in San Salvador (March–April 1972). Moreover, before his return to his native country, Dalton had submitted what is perhaps his most important literary achievement, The Forbidden Stories of Tom Thumb [Las historias prohibidas del Pulgarcito] (1974), to the publisher Siglo XXI Editores.
So, in 1973, Roque is neither an unknown person nor an unpublished author. But his avatar is tied to that of his country in a way that is now almost cabalistic. In November 1972, Miguel Mármol was published in Costa Rica and not in El Salvador, because on July 19, 1972, Salvadoran Army troops entered the National University and closed it down. The dean, secretary general, and attorney general, as well as various chairpersons and professors of the university were apprehended by the authorities and sent into exile. In fact, they were the last Salvadorans to be exiled; from then on, the punishment for dissent was machine-gunning, persecution, and murder.
In the 1970s, El Salvador entered a new political cycle, which in March 1972 was aggravated by a scandalous electoral fraud against the National Opposition Union, a coalition of progressive groups. The situation devolved a few days later, on March 25, when a coup d’état which sought to restore the democracy violated by fraud was suppressed.
The die was cast when the spaces for open debate were shut down. El Salvador was heading for war. Dalton deciphered those signs in Havana and set out on a hasty but premeditated return.
The man who must be recognized as the most daring and innovative Salvadoran writer and intellectual of the twentieth century gave it his all and threw himself into the flames. Immolation? No. Suicide? Not at all. Was he afraid? Surely, but to those who say this I quote Rubén Darío’s response to accusations of being a mere romantic: “We are romantic. Who that lives is not?”
Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle is an urgent book that can be understood as the willful action of a poet who cannot stop recording, even at the risk of suffocating, the tumult of decisive events of which he is a part. This is also a book of confirmations. Roque thus lends continuity, in the midst of the clandestine flow in which he forges his days, to a line of poetic creation that perhaps starts with Very Personal Texts and Poems [Textos y poemas muy personales] (written between 1963 and 1965) and culminates in the poem-collage that he left unpublished before his final goodbye, A Red Book for Lenin [Un libro rojo para Lenin] (completed in 1973). Some critics have described Stories and Poems as decadent and pamphleteering. They forget the context in which it was articulated, and the vein from which it flows.
It goes without saying that this collection of poems does not reveal a concrete reality (poetry, as Roque Dalton knows perfectly well, has another mission) or a precise polemic, but a vital attitude. Yes, here the author is having fun ranting, disqualifying, mocking. He is celebrating his return to El Salvador in the midst of a hailstorm of bullets. He is affirming himself. He is neither tragic nor pathetic; he prefers his corrosive good humor to the mournful singsong that the pitiful bard has already forgotten. Here Dalton affirms that the new word is risk.
Revisiting this book thirty-four years after it was written, one gets the feeling that Roque, in his determined political zeal, not only communicates his reasons but is also aware that every day may be his last. That is why these pages have a strange power: they evoke situations, announce collisions, propose boundaries.
But Stories and Poems is also a literary artifact that must be understood in relation to the era in Central American history that it was enmeshed in.
In the political arena, in Nicaragua and Guatemala, as in El Salvador, an energy had been unleashed that created new horizons of structural transformation. By 1973, in Nicaragua, the perspective of change had regained its strategic spirit and was redirected toward more tangible objectives. In January 1972, a “new guerilla” contingent entered Guatemala through Ixcán and, a few years later, became the Guerilla Army of the Poor.
In Cuba, from 1968 to 1971, Roque Dalton actively participated, alongside Nicaraguans (led by Carlos Fonseca Amador, “Agatón”) and Guatemalans (led by Ricardo Ramírez de León, “Orlando Fernández,” and “Rolando Morán”), in discussions that sought to reconfigure guerilla warfare.
In fact, Dalton was linked to the People’s Revolutionary Army as early as 1971 and had a specific assignment in Cuba. Thus, he was already a subject of discussion upon his return to El Salvador.
Roque Dalton was not a spectator in Havana. He forged ideas, informed himself, debated, promoted initiatives. He wrote like a man possessed, and not only poetry as some maliciously pontificated. He traveled here and there, sniffed out paths, explored vistas, all without having a perfectly delineated map, as only true adventurers do. All of which is recorded in this collection of poems.
In Tavern and Other Places [Taberna y otros lugares] (1969), he found a truthful point of view for his poetry; in The Forbidden Stories of Tom Thumb, he demystified and inaugurated poetic discourses; in A Red Book for Lenin, he theorized about poetry. In Stories and Poems, Dalton accelerated the pace and began to sing in chorus a dissonant song.
Following the path of Bertolt Brecht, an author dear to Roque, and playing with heteronyms (as Fernando Pessoa did in his time, in another context of course), Dalton in Stories and Poems faces the mellifluous Parnassus and the mediocre political-body-that-requires-blood-sweat-and-tears. The book demands and exposes.
To read this book as a list of pains and sorrows would be to miss the point that modern poetry, composed here by an author who is pushing up to the existential limits, has as its main objective to continue the tradition of rupture.
When considering Roque Dalton’s poetic output, one is always at risk of wanting to restrict it to such and such characteristics. Because when considering this book alone, one might think that all roads are closed for Dalton’s poetics. It is true, that not all the poems in this volume have the same level of formal elaboration. Had the author survived, he probably would have left out certain texts, added others, and even rewritten a good part of them. That was his practice as a responsible writer.
Now as I write, in 2023, perhaps some poems or, for some persnickety people, the whole of Stories and Poems may be considered out of focus, because of the insolent and merciless way Dalton deals with themes and problems, even characters. But is it not similar to what he did in The Forbidden Stories of Tom Thumb?
By 1974, the year in which most of the poems in Stories and Poems seem to have been forged (his explicit references suggest so), Roque is neither a dilettante writer nor a novice political activist. He is living a spectacular moment in his life, a circumstance longed for and desperately sought since at least 1971, when he realized that another political moment had opened up in his country. He did not come to pay a debt but to adopt the position he believed to be appropriate in that difficult period for El Salvador. He could have declined or used various imaginary pretexts to postpone his return until the political climate was mild. He preferred to take the thorny path.
This book is not a testament but a poetic testimony. Here the poet does not stop being a poet—rather, he raises the flag of poetry to tell us what his skin / his mind / his guts are experiencing in that political circumstance.
Salvadoran poetry and Central American poetry have come a long way since 1975, and it cannot be said that they have only addressed the literary problems raised by Dalton. However, it is undeniable that Roque’s poetics introduced substantive novelties that have exerted and will surely continue to exert an outsized influence on the region’s literary creation, for his courage and also for his irreverence.
Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle in no sense constitutes a failed literary endeavor on the part of Roque Dalton. It must be read as a bold yet cautious act unfolding in a context where words count but deeds are decisive. These poems are about that. This book, it must be stated without ambiguity, contains the essence of Roque Dalton’s literary program, that of an author who, at the age of forty, does not hesitate to start from scratch.
When one considers Dalton’s literary trajectory, of which his extensive bibliography provides ample testimony, it is evident that the author is constantly concerned with themes that hold the possibility of a shipwreck. Only a creator whose intellectual disposition demands that he take huge risks could dare to jump over the obstacles without wincing in pain. The material in this book comes out of this frame of mind.
Time has passed. The literary production of Roque Dalton circulates freely. His writing style and ethos point to complexity and, in certain parts, to obscurity. But his word, the ever-living poetry of which he was a devoted practitioner, is alive.
Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle, signaled by certain critics and pundits as a book of little account, should be seen as an ugly duckling. It keeps turning up, revealing a pulsing world, and giving an account of the saga of an audacious and energetic creator.
—Jaime Barba
San Salvador, Central America
March 2023
To celebrate Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth), we're very excited to present THE NIGHT TREMBLES, a FREE eBook collection of powerful excerpts from new, forthcoming, and classic books in translation by some of our favorite women authors, all published by Seven Stories Press.
Featuring selections from books by Annie Ernaux, Claudia Rankine, Assia Djebar, Liliana Corobca, Ivana Bodrožić, Nadia Terranova, Clyo Mendoza, and Zyta Rudzka; translated by Alison L. Strayer, Ann Goldstein, Christina MacSweeny, Ellen Elias-Bursać, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Monica Cure, Tegan Raleigh, and Cecilia Pavón.
Included in the sampler are passages from:
- Fury by Clyo Mendoza, translated by Christina MacSweeney
- Kinderland by Liliana Corobca, translated by Monica Cure
- The Young Man by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer
- Trema La Notte (The Night Trembles) by Nadia Terranova, translated by Ann Goldstein
- Dr. Josef's Little Beauty by Zyta Rudzka, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
- Sons, Daughters by Ivana Bodrožić, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać
- Just Us / Solo Nostros by Claudia Rankine, translated by Cecilia Pavón
- The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry: Algerian Stories by Assia Djebar, translated by Tegan Raleigh
As you may have heard, we're running a big sitewide sale — you may have even placed an order already! But we've published a lot of books over the past 23 years, meaning there are many, many titles to sift through. We thought it might be helpful to share some recommendations* from the staffers at Seven Stories Press, to hopefully add a little structure to the literary madness and open your eyes to some books that you may have otherwise missed. And all for up to 60% off list price. What a delight.
* We love all of our children equally, of course. These are just some books we're really digging at the moment.
During our first-ever warehouse sale, we're offering up to 60% off everything on our website. Below, you'll find a small selection of the books offered at 60% off list price.
To explore more of our books for adults, click here.
To explore more books for children and teens,click here.
To explore our Spanish-language books, click here.
The other week [in my newsletter], I mentioned hearing about the subway chokehold death right after I’d had lunch with a friend who’d once lived in a platform. We’ll be hearing more about that chokehold soon. Right now, I’d like to tell you about my friend.
His name is Lee Stringer. I met Lee about 30 years ago when I was researching a novel called THE INTRUDER. It’s about a family on the Upper West Side that gets stalked by a homeless man who believes they’ve stolen the life he was meant to have. But the twist is much of the book is from the homeless guy’s point of view.
I did some of the research by working at a homeless shelter for a year and visiting the residences of the “mole people” who lived in the train tunnels under Riverside Park. But the more important contribution came from Lee. I met him through my friend Janet Wickenhaver, who was the editor of Street News at the time. Lee was one of her star writers. He was also sleeping under a desk at the office, which was several steps up from his old address - a storage compartment in a Grand Central Station platform, where he’d smoke crack and occasionally write things down with the pencil he used to pry extra resin from his pipe.
Within two minutes of meeting Lee, I knew he was someone special. The initial vibe was a bit like William Powell playing the dignified hobo in My Man Godfrey, a nobleman getting through hard times with a wry humor and stoicism. He never asked for sympathy or spare change. Instead he offered his stories and insights free of charge. He gave me the key to escape the cage of liberal condescension, so I could at least begin to imagine how just about anyone could end up on the street.
I’m not going to tell you much more of Lee’s story; he can do it better himself. Because unlike 99.99 percent of the human race, Lee didn’t just dream about writing a book. He figured out how to plant his ass in a seat and write the damn book. His first one was called Grand Central Winter and if you haven’t read it, you should. Kurt Vonnegut compared Lee to Jack London and even Oprah gave him a nod. It’s something better than an inspirational tome; it’s readable, as well as being funny poignant. It sold in multiple countries and helped Lee get out from under that desk and into an apartment.
He's written other books since then and has helped a lot of people facilitating writers’ workshops at the Cedar Knolls Academy in Hawthorne, which he attended in his youth, and consulting at Project Renewal, where he bested his worst habits in recovery. He also memorably appeared in an episode of CBS’s BLUE BLOODS, written by moi, called “Unbearable Loss.” But the pandemic was rough on him. The work went away and Lee was diagnosed in mid-2021 with something called “smoldering myeloma.” If someone offers it to you, just say no. Especially if it comes paired with a prostate cancer diagnosis.
But there’s something indomitable in Lee, and part of it is the loyalty he inspires in the people who know him. His friend and publisher Dan Simon, who runs Seven Stories Press, was able to hunt down specialists at a clinic in Little Rock, Arkansas and then, improbably and heroically, was able to get Lee there without proper identification in order. Even more improbably, Lee responded well to a regimen of five different chemotherapies, kept breathing through the onslaught of COPD respiratory problems, and was basically the same funny debonair guy when we had lunch in Westchester a few weeks back.
I know for a fact that he’s not thrilled that there’s a GoFundMe to help him deal with bills that piled up when he was fighting for his life. He’s a proud, self-sufficient man. Unlike a lot of better-off people I know, Lee has never gotten “T.Rex arms” that can’t reach out when a check hits the table. As usual, I had to tell him to put his wallet away when we finished our lunch.
But the truth is, Lee is far from being the only writer who has to hustle to make a living nowadays. We hear a lot about the decline in median income for film and television writers that’s motivated the current strike against corporate content producers. I’m lucky enough to be one of those who made a decent living before joining the picket line. But I’m also part of an organization called the Authors League Fund, which offers emergency assistance to authors, poets, critics, journalists, and other qualified writers who find themselves up against it financially in the face of health problems, eviction notices and other devastating life circumstances. I’m not liberty to share many details, but suffice to say you’d be surprised how many names you’d recognize among our applicants and how desperate their needs can be.
Now I can imagine somebody saying So what? I got laid off from my job as a welder and no one’s starting a fund to help me pay my bills. And you’d be right. As John O’Hara said, an artist is his own fault (or hers or whatever). It’s a voluntary job, and most people sincerely don’t care if another book ever gets published. They’d rather be watching Netflix or, these days, spending time on TikTok.
But speaking just for me, I don’t want to live in a country that lets its authors fall by the wayside when they hit hard times. Because their stories were there when I needed them, and some day somebody else may need them as well.
Peter Blauner is the author of nine novels, including Slow Motion Riot, winner of an Edgar Allan Poe award for best first novel from Mystery Writers of America, and The Intruder, a New York Times bestseller and a bestseller overseas. He began his career as a journalist for New York magazine in the 1980s and segued into writing fiction in the 1990s. His short fiction has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories and on Selected Shorts from Symphony Space. He has been a staff writer for several television shows, including Law & Order: SVU and Blue Bloods. His new novel, Picture in the Sand, which spans sixty years and the distance from Hollywood to Cairo, was published by Minotaur/St. Martin’s Press in January, 2023. It is his first work of historical fiction. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. with his wife, author Peg Tyre.
To celebrate the release of Prince in a Pastry Shop by Marek Bienczyk, illustrated Joanna Concejo, and translated from the Polish by Benjamin Paloff, we are proud to share an excerpt from the book: a set of three spreads in which the two characters, Not-So-Little-Prince and Prickly Pair, dreamily discuss the nature of happiness as they eat confections.
“There's the rub: happiness passes us by quite unnoticed. You expect genuine happiness, that it's like, ‘Oh, it'll be here tomorrow, in a week, eventually.’ And it never occurs to you that you're living it here and now. Eating this napoleon with me, and now this truffle ... But I would recommend the donut, it’s the best.”
Click the images below to see the spreads in large format.
In a beautifully illustrated story for adults, one that is playful, slightly naughty, and charmingly philosophical, two characters — the Not-So-Little-Prince and Prickly Pear — consider the nature of happiness, all the while feasting on confections in a bakery.
Much more than a tale of sweet indulgence, Prince in a Pastry Shop touches on a fundamental question: what does it mean to be happy? Is happiness to be found in the smallest, most visceral of experiences like eating a sugar-dusted donut? Can we truly experience happiness while there is suffering in the world? Is there a great cosmic balance that demands for every happy moment there also be a moment of sorrow? Can we be happy knowing that it’s a fleeting condition? Can we really know and understand happiness while we’re experiencing it?
“Happiness is nothing but trouble,” says the Not-So-Little-Prince. For Prickly Pear, happiness simply tastes like a cupcake or profiterole.
The words of writer Marek Bieńczyk, winner of Poland’s prestigious Nike prize, pair with artist Joanna Concejo’s illustrations to create a wonderland where sitting at a café table morphs into a dreamscape with animals, a borderland between waking and dreaming.
With a very light touch, Prince in a Pastry Shop asks one of the most profound questions of our existence: is it enough to appreciate each moment of sweetness—and at what cost?—or must we be active in an unforgiving world to find contentment?
FORTHCOMING BOOKS FROM 2022 NOBEL LAUREATE ANNIE ERNAUX
FORTHCOMING LITERARY FICTION AND MEMOIR
In a beautifully illustrated story for adults, one that is playful, slightly naughty, and charmingly philosophical, two characters — the Not-So-Little-Prince and Prickly Pear — consider the nature of happiness, all the while feasting on confections in a bakery.
Much more than a tale of sweet indulgence, Prince in a Pastry Shop touches on a fundamental question important to us all, from pre-schooler to pensioner: what does it mean to be happy? “Happiness is nothing but trouble,” says the Not-So-Little-Prince. For Prickly Pear, happiness simply tastes like a cupcake or profiterole.
The words of writer Marek Bieńczyk, winner of Poland’s prestigious Nike prize, pair with artist Joanna Concejo’s illustrations to create a wonderland where sitting at a café table morphs into a dreamscape with animals, a borderland between waking and dreaming.
With a very light touch, Prince in a Pastry Shop asks one of the most profound questions of our existence: is it enough to appreciate each moment of sweetness—and at what cost?—or must we be active in an unforgiving world to find contentment?
A dazzling memoir of chronic illness that explores the fraught intersection between pain, language, and gender, by a debut author.
In A Matter of Appearance, Wells traces her journey as she tries to understand and define the chronic pain she has lived with all her life. She draws on the critical works of Freud, Sontag, and others to explore the intersection between gender, pain, and language, and she traces a direct line from the “hysteria patients” at the Salpêtrière Hospital in nineteenth-century Paris to the contemporary New Age healers in Los Angeles, her stomping ground. At the crux of Wells’ literary project is the dilemma of how to diagnose an experience that is both private and public, subjective and quantifiable, and how to express all this in words.
“Gorgeously written and brilliantly argued, A Matter of Appearance uses chronic illness as a lever to investigate the life of a body. It’s complex, inconclusive, and incredibly clear-eyed. Moving fluidly between histories of psychoanalysis, desire, ambition, pathology, Wells reminds us of the liminal state we all live in between sickness and health.”
—Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia and Summer of Hate
"[Tova Reich’s] verbal blade is amazingly, ingeniously, startlingly, all-consumingly, all-encompassingly, deservedly, and brilliantly savage.” —Cynthia Ozick
In this extraordinary collection of short fiction, Tova Reich dives deep into the world of Orthodox Jewry — a world that her stories embrace with respect and affection while also poking at the faultlines in its unshakeable traditions.
The eight stories collected in this volume are all populated by seekers—of holiness, illumination, liberation, meaning, love. Their journeys unfold in the U.S., Israel, Poland, China, often in the very heart of the Jewish world, and are rendered with an insider’s authority. The narrative voice bringing all this to life has been described as fearlessly satiric and subversive, with a moral but not moralizing edge, equally alive to the sacred and the profane, comically absurd to the point of tragedy.
Going Remote is a joint production of The Censored Press and Seven Stories Press.
A searingly honest graphic memoir dispatch from a community college professor who cares deeply for his students and family while also combating personal health issues from the frontlines of public education during the pandemic.
With Peter Glanting’s powerful illustrations, author Adam Bessie, an English professor and graphic essayist, uses the unique historical moment of the COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst to explore the existing inequalities and student struggles that plague the public education system. This graphic memoir chronicles the reverberations from the onset of the pandemic in 2020 when students and educators left their physical classrooms for remote learning. As a professor at a community college, Bessie shows how despite these challenges, teachers work tirelessly to create a more equitable educational system by responding to mental health issues and student needs.
From the Black Lives Matter protests to fielding distressed emails from students to considering the future of his own career, Going Remote also tells the personal story of Bessie’s cancer diagnosis and treatment during the pandemic. A fusion of memoir, meditation, and scholarship, Going Remote is a powerful account of a crisis moment in educational history demonstrating both personal and societal changes.
A breathtaking short novel about the complicated feelings of hate and pity in familial love, by an acknowledged Latin American master.
A brilliant and dark tour de force, Jewish Son presents the delicate archeology of the stubbornness of a boy who demands his parents’ attention. It is a brutal confession of the lies necessary to win a space of approval in a troubled family, a treatise on the excesses of love and the paradoxical lack of affection that is never enough, an accomplished narration of childhood from the point of view of the adult gaze, and a rewriting of Kafka’s Letter to His Father. As his father’s imminent death becomes an ever more concrete reality with surgeries, caregivers, sedatives and his mother grows obsessed with visits to the rabbi and amasses saint cards and Buddhist prayers, the narrator evokes the remnants of the rejection that pervaded his childhood. Without yielding to the idealization of youth or to the delight in pain before physical decay and death, Guebel dissects, beautifully although with discomfort, his very early conversion to the dream of literature as an act of reparation.
San Francisco is on the verge of collapse in this gritty, grimy noir set in a future that gets closer every second.
Former San Francisco Literary Laureate Peter Plate who taught himself to write fiction during eight years squatting in abandoned buildings, delivers a fast-paced dystopian and speculative novel — the latest in a hardboiled writing career that spans the era of out-of-control gentrification in the Bay Area.
Nelson Algren's classic 1947 short story collection is the pure vein Algren would mine for all his subsequent novels and stories. The stories in this collection are literary triumphs that don't fade away.
As rock and roll novelist Tom Carson writes in his introduction, "The Neon Wilderness is the pivotal book of Nelson Algren's career — the one which bid a subdued but determined farewell to everything that had earlier made him no more than just another good writer, and inaugurated the idiosyncratic, bedevilled, cantankerously poetic sensibility that would see him ranked among the few literary originals of his times."
A beautiful and heartrending short novel that unfolds through the unanswered letters of a young girl to her absent parents, relaying lively tales of cruel pranks and jovial reconciliations, pain and tenderness, despair and hope of real-life young children who grow up alone.
“In [Kinderland] Liliana Corobca has painstakingly examined…locations and territories that resemble Lord of the Flies… and has written a novel that is complicated and harsh, but also moving and full of candor.” —Observator Cultural
A stunning debut collection of fiction and creative nonfiction — irreverent and unglorified; loving and tender; uncomfortable and inconvenient — by a Ukrainian writer currently fighting for his country in Kyiv.
Includes the celebrated title story "The Ukraine," which was published in the New Yorker in 2022.
The Ukraine is a collection of 26 pieces that deliberately blur the line between nonfiction and fiction, conjuring the essence of a beloved country through its tastes, smells, and sounds, its small towns and big cities, its people and their compassion and indifference, simplicities and complications.
Ivana Bodrožić’s latest award-winning novel tells a story of being locked in: socially, domestically and intimately, told through three different perspectives, all deeply marked and wounded by the patriarchy in their own way.
Here the Croatian poet and writer depicts a wrenching love between a transgender man and a woman as well as a demanding love between a mother and a daughter in a narrative about breaking through and liberation of the mind, family, and society. This is a story of hidden gay and trans relationships, the effects of a near-fatal accident, and an oppressed childhood, where Ivana Bodrožić tackles the issues addressed in her previous works—issues of otherness, identity and gender, pain and guilt, injustice and violence.
These three stories run parallel and intertwine. Three voices deepen and give perspective to one another’s truth, pain, and struggle to survive.
FORTHCOMING POLITICAL NON-FICTION
Twenty-first century social movements come to life through speeches, essays, and other documents of activism, protest, and social change.
Gathering more than 100 texts from social movements that have shaped the 21st century, this powerful book includes contributions from Angela Y. Davis, Nick Estes, Colin Kaepernick, Rebecca Solnit, Christian Smalls, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Howard Zinn, Bree Newsome, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Tarana J. Burke, Mariame Kaba, Naomi Klein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Linda Sarsour, Chelsea E. Manning, and others.
Inspired by the original Voices of a People’s History of the United States, the book features speeches, essays, poems, and calls to action from Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Indigenous struggles, immigrant rights activists, the environmental movement, disability justice organizers, and frontline workers during the global pandemic who spoke out against the life-threatening conditions of their labor. Together, their words remind us that history is made not only by the rich and powerful, but by ordinary people taking collective action.
Groundbreaking solutions to the climate crisis from scientists, engineers, civic leaders, entrepreneurs and activists, offering hope to all readers concerned about our planet's future.
This book offers practical actions that reflect technological and economic advances, and features an introduction by former United States senator Russ Feingold.
Solving the Climate Crisis is a hopeful and critical resource that makes a convincing and detailed case that there is a path forward to save our environment. Illustrating the power of committed individuals and the necessity for collaborative government and private-sector climate action, the book focuses on three essential areas for action:
The technological dimension: move to 100% clean renewable energy as fast as we possibly can through innovations like clean-steel, “green” cement, and carbon-reuse companies;
The ecological dimension: enhance and protect natural ecosystems, forests, and agricultural lands to safely store greenhouse gases and restore soils, transforming how we grow, process, and consume food;
The social dimension: update and create new laws, policies and economic measures to recenter human values and reduce environmental and social injustice.
Cuban art critic and curator Iván de la Nuez explores the effects of the policies that have tried to constrain or liberate Cuba in recent decades in these sparkling essays of cultural criticism.
Essays on Cuba and the Cuban diaspora, on racism and Big Data, Guantánamo and Reggaeton, soccer and baseball, Obama and the Rolling Stones, Europe and Donald Trump—de la Nuez approaches his criticism with singularity of purpose. In Cubanthropy he does not set out to explain Cuba to the world, but rather to put the world into a Cuban context.
A graphic novel featuring uplifting stories of combatting—and beating—calls for their eviction in Detroit, showing how everyday people are fighting to stay in their homes, organizing with their communities, and winning.
We Live Here! is a graphic novel biography of the members of the local activist group Detroit Eviction Defense combatting—and beating—calls for their eviction. By illustrating the stories of families struggling against evictions, the book gives a voice to those who have remained in Detroit, showing the larger complexities at work in a beleaguered city. These are everyday people fighting back, organizing with others, going into the streets, and winning their homes back.
A reevaluation of life the man who saved the Mexican Revolution, published on the 100th anniversary of his death.
A wild ride and revealing portrait of the controversial Pancho Villa, one of Mexico’s most beloved (or loathed) heroes, that finally establishes the importance of his role in the triumph of the Mexican revolution by renowned writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II.
Pancho Villa is a rollicking, sometimes hilariously comical, sometimes extremely violent, and always very personal portrait of the controversial Mexican historical figure Pancho Villa. Beloved crime writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II (a.k.a. PIT)—the prolific historian, biographer of Che Guevara and the founder of Mexican “neopolicial” fiction—brings his tremendous storytelling skills to an account of one of the Mexico’s greatest legendary characters.
With his vibrant narrative style, Taibo describes the adventures of Pancho Villa with incredible stories, the stuff of history and tragedy, backed up by tremendous research. Throughout, Taibo unveils secrets about the life of one of Mexico's most courageous and charismatic leaders. Includes period photographs that indelibly capture the rocky transition from the wild and agrarian past towards modern statehood.
There have always been people who said NO to what they considered unjust and unfair. They Said No is an historical fiction series for younger readers of protestors, activists, poets, revolutionaries and other brave changemakers from around the world that emphasizes the importance of standing up for what you know is right.
You Are Everything takes readers on a journey that begins before the existence of space and time and ends in the present day. Illustrated by Iranian-American artist Shilla Shakoori, the story is a cosmically inclusive embrace of our interconnectedness.
With each turn of the page your transformation unfolds from a being that just is to one that becomes the world around us. And if you can take a moment off from all the doing that you do, author Arabian suggests, and let yourself simply be, you may realize that you are not just one person — you are also everything in the universe.
Readers who love Rumi and stories from Persian mystics or anyone interested in mindfulness and a greater awareness of being in the world will love You Are Everything.
A story of quiet contemplation and steely resolve by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, illustrated for readers of all ages.
On the banks of a river near his grandparents’ farm, a boy is about to catch a big fish. At the same moment that he loses his prey, the boy has a moment of growing awareness of the interconnectedness of all things. He is compelled to try again to catch the fish even though he is sure it’s gone. And even though his chance has passed and he is company only to silence, he has staked a claim there by the river’s edge.
From a childhood memory detailed in his book Small Memories, José Saramago spins a tale of quiet depth and wisdom – here translated by Margaret Jull Costa, and beautifully illustrated by Yolanda Mosquera.
What can abolition mean for a child? How can it help them dream a different future for their community?
In Abolition is Love, Amelie learns about collective care, mutual aid, and abolitionist ideas as they help their parents get ready for the annual Prisoners’ Justice Day. Amelie explores big concepts like love, justice, and care, and learns how we can build a different world together through the small choices we make every day. They learn to resolve a conflict with their cousin who plays differently than they do, they help their Papa plan a more accessible park for all, and collectively they create a beautiful banner. Amelie is also excited to hold their own candle at the rally, and they look forward to this big kid moment–to join the ranks of activists calling for justice and abolition. The book explores possibilities for hope, and offers ideas for caring for each other and building communities rooted in social justice and safety for all people. Parents and teachers can engage young readers with the expansive illustrations and prompts that suggest new ways of being in the world together.
A clever and quirky puzzle book from the legendary graphic designer is a blast for kids and caregivers.
With every page of colorful, original illustration, MistakEs invites young readers to spot what’s not right. Whose feet are sticking out of the blanket at the end of the bed? Which turtle isn’t like the rest? One clock doesn’t work—can you find it? These are just some of the funny, off-kilter puzzles and challenges artist Seymour Chwast presents for your amusement and instruction. Kids—and parents and siblings and teachers and librarians—will love spending time finding the mistakes. Includes an answer key in the back.
The first YA biography of Jane Jacobs, the visionary activist, urbanist, and thinker who transformed the way we inhabit and develop our cities.
Jane Jacobs was born more than a hundred years ago, yet the ideas she popularized—about cities, about people, about making a better world—remain hugely relevant today. Now, in Jane Jacobs: Champion of Cities, Champion of People, we have the first biography for young people of the visionary activist, urbanist, and thinker.
Here is a story of standing up for what you know is right, with real-world takeaways for young activists. Jane Jacobs: Champion of Cities, Champion of People emphasizes how today’s teens can take inspiration from Jane’s own activism “playbook,” promoting change by focusing on local issues and community organizing.
Centering Black voices and slave narratives, this illustrated young adult history offers a thoroughly researched account with first-hand testimonies of how slaves themselves were a driving force behind their own emancipation.
This compelling look at history is an educational eye-opener for history buffs of all ages, and offers clarity on one of the most turbulent periods of US history. This new paperback edition features a new introduction by historian Robin D. G. Kelley.
Boldly weird, cool, and confident, this YA novel of LGBTQ+ teen artists, activists, and telepathic visionaries offers hope against climate and community destruction. From the National Book Award–longlisted author of Out of Salem.
James Goldman, self-described neurotic goth gay transsexual stoner, is a senior in high school, and fully over it. He mostly ignores his classes at Cow Pie High, instead focusing on fundraising for the near-bankrupt local LGBTQ+ youth support group, Compton House, and attending punk shows with his friend-crush Ian and best friend Opal. But when James falls in love with Orsino, a homeschooled trans boy with telepathic powers and visions of the future, he wonders if the scope of what he believes possible is too small. Orsino, meanwhile, hopes that in James he has finally found someone who will be able to share the apocalyptic visions he has had to keep to himself, and better understand the powers they hold.
An entertaining and accessible introduction to the radical philosopher of freedom of thought and religion is the only biography of Spinoza for young adults.
Abbie Hoffman — national provocateur, political activist, founding member of the Yippies, defendant in the trial of the Chicago Seven, and author of Steal This Book, Revolution for the Hell of It, and Fuck the System — died on April 12, 1989. He was 52.
To celebrate his memory, we are proud to share the late Paul Krassner's foreword to the book Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman, written by Abbie's brother, Jack Hoffman, and Seven Stories Press publisher Dan Simon. Krassner's foreword, written a few weeks before his death in July 2019, perfectly conveys the contradiction of Abbie Hoffman — his unbridled silliness combined with a fiery political activism and passion for justice, creating a figure that simultaneously antagonized, amused, and terrified the highly conservative leaders of the era.
Dan Simon wrote of this contradiction, so pivotal to the living memory of Abbie Hoffman, in October 2020, soon after seeing the film The Trial of the ChicagoSeven:
Maybe the most important idea in Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman, the biography of Abbie that I wrote with his brother Jack, appears in the very first paragraph of chapter 1. It’s the idea that a sense of futility was the source of Abbie’s remarkable energy and optimism, and that in the end his deep optimism held the same tragic seed as our despair. What prompted Jack and me to go there was the derailed life of his brilliant aunt Rose, a diagnosed schizophrenic who spent most of her adult life institutionalized. So in that opening paragraph it wasn’t our despair but his aunt Rose’s. No matter.
After I watched [The Trail of the Chicago Seven], I found myself thinking about Abbie and his aunt Rose, and the relationship between despair and optimism. Despair and optimism may share the same seed, and this may lead in the direction of optimism, a kind of optimism that doesn’t hide its kinship with despair, or maybe, to name it more accurately, a kind of faith in people. After Abbie died, we published the book that he and I had worked on together. He had envisioned it to be like the “Best of” albums that the musical artists of his era made—Dylan, the Stones, the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, the Dead—and gave it the title The Best of Abbie Hoffman—his three ’60s and early ’70s books in one volume. We had buttons made: “Abbie Lives.” I still have a few. And he does.
FOREWORD
by Paul Krassner
I think it was 1967.
“What is this, we’re huddled together like in a fuckin’ ghetto, afraid to watch a fuckin’ parade,” Abbie Hoffman was saying.
We’d decided to confront the Armed Forces Day Parade coming down Fifth Avenue. There were a lot of us.
But then a police captain approached someone in our group and said, “I’m gonna have to give you a summons for holding a meeting without a permit.”
“We’re merely having a conversation, Officer. And why are you singling me out?”
“You seem to be leading the meeting,” the captain replied.
Although I was there as a reporter covering this action for the Realist, at that moment I crossed the line that separated observer from participant: “Excuse me, Officer, we’re both leading the meeting. You’d better give me a summons too.”
Right away, Abbie looked around and spoke up: “Who else is leading this meeting?”
Hands went up.
“I am.”
More hands.
“I am.”
“I am.”
“I am.”
It turned out that about fifty people were leading the meeting.
“Okay, I’m not gonna give you a summons, but the next time you hold a meeting—”
“You mean,” I interjected, “the next time we don’t hold a meeting—”
“—you better have a permit.”
“I’m sorry, Officer, we can’t continue this meeting any longer without a permit.”
The Armed Forces Day Parade began making its way down Fifth Avenue. The marines marched by and we chanted, “Get a girl, not a gun.”
The navy marched by and we sang “Yellow Submarine.”
Green Berets marched by and we shouted, “Thou shalt not kill!”
The Red Cross marched by and we applauded.
A missile rolled by and we called out, “Shame!”
Military cadets rode by on horseback and we advised, “Drop out now!”
The Department of Sanitation swept past and we cheered.
Then this horde of pacifists and hippies left the area and entered Central Park, followed by what seemed like a whole division of police. We romped past the statue of Alice and her friends playing around a giant mushroom; some lingered to present flowers to the Mad Hatter. The cops ordered them off the statue, surrounding Alice as if they were guarding a fortress.
When it was all over, I left with Abbie. Our paths had crossed at various meetings and events, but we’d never really hung around together. Now, over soup, he was telling me about the time he had taken one of my “Fuck Communism” posters to a symposium on communism, and how influenced he was by the Realist, the satirical magazine I had founded.
I asked, “Do you think it’s an ego trip for me to be concerned about whether the readers of the Realist think I’m on an ego trip?”
He laughed and said, “You only ask a question like that because you’re Jewish.”
“But I don’t think of myself as Jewish. I’m an atheist. I mean, Christ was Jewish.”
“When I was at Brandeis,” Abbie said thoughtfully, “I asked this professor, ‘How come in one part of the Bible Jesus says to God, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” But in another part of the Bible, Jesus says to God, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do”?’ And the professor says, ‘You gotta remember, the Bible was written by a lot of different guys.’”
Abbie tempered his fearlessness with a gift for humor that was sharp and spontaneous.
On a particularly tense night on the Lower East Side, we were standing on a street corner when a patrol car with four police in it cruised by. Abbie called out, “Hey, fellas, you goin’ out on a double date?” These were some of the same cops from the Ninth Precinct that he liked to beat at pool at what I call the “laughing pool table” because of how Abbie made the cops laugh.
Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman does a meticulous job of capturing the marvel that was Abbie Hoffman as I knew him. It’s an indispensable book about an indispensable hero of the sixties’ near-revolution in America that Abbie helped lead with such incredible imagination. Dan caught the tale end of the movement as a red-diaper baby growing up in Boston: his mom taught with Howard Zinn at BU, and his dad once joined a mission to deliver medical equipment to Bach Mai Hospital after it was bombed during the Vietnam War. With Abbie as one of his heroes, Dan worked with the Attica Brothers Legal Defense while in high school. Later, he edited and published The Best of Abbie Hoffman, Abbie’s last book. Jack of course was Abbie’s little brother and sidekick through the years, more a businessman than an activist, but he loved his older brother and lived in his shadow.
Back on that first day of our long friendship, I told Abbie, “You’re the first one who’s really made me laugh since Lenny Bruce died.” Lenny Bruce had been in many ways my closest friend, and I had written his autobiography with him.
“Really?” Abbie replied, genuinely impressed. “Lenny Bruce was my god.”
— DESERT HOT SPRINGS, CA, JULY 2019
PAUL KRASSNER (1932–2019) was co-founder with Abbie of the Yippies and one of Abbie’s longest standing friends and collaborators. The founder and longtime editor of the Realist and the author of many books, including The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race, One Hand Jerking, and Impolite Interviews, he lived with his partner, Nancy Cain, in the desert in Southern California. Paul Krassner died on Sunday, July 21, 2019, in Desert Hot Springs, California.
With the forthcoming publication of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century, a new collection edited by Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, we are proud to share a series of excerpts from the book, which will be published individually each week on the Seven Stories blog until the book's release.
This week's excerpt adapts Nick Estes' is speech from the first annual Native Liberation Conference, held on Saturday, August 13, 2016 at the Larry Casuse Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The stated goal of this conference, organized by The Red Nation, is to "orient, update, and educate the collective membership of The Red Nation and general public on local, regional, and international movements for Indigenous liberation."
A new companion to the classic collection edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century brings together more than 100 activist texts on social and economic justice that have shaped the last 22 years. The editors, Arnove and Pessin, offer a curated collection of voices of hope and resistance from Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the struggle for Indigenous liberation, activist groups for immigrant rights, environmentalist movements, disability justice organizing, and frontline workers during the global pandemic who spoke out against the life-threatening conditions of their labor.
Included in this new book are writings by Angela Y. Davis, Nick Estes, Colin Kaepernick, Rebecca Solnit, Christian Smalls, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Howard Zinn, Rev. William Barber, Bree Newsome, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Tarana J. Burke, Dream Defenders, Sins Invalid, Mariame Kaba, Naomi Klein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Linda Sarsour, Chelsea E. Manning, Chrishaun “CeCe” McDonald, Julian Brave NoiseCat, H. Melt, and others. Together, their words remind us that history is made not only by the rich and powerful, but by ordinary people taking collective action.
Nick Estes, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, is a cofounder of The Red Nation, an organization “dedicated to the liberation of Native peoples from capitalism and colonialism.” Here is part of his speech at the first annual Native Liberation Conference at the Larry Casuse Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Nick Estes, “Native Liberation: The Way Forward”
(August 13, 2016)
The Red Nation formed in November 2014 out of a collective desire to create a platform for revolutionary Native organizing and to fight back against this settler colonial system that seeks our annihilation. That very summer, two Navajo men, our relatives Allison “Cowboy” Gorman and Kee “Rabbit” Thompson, were brutally murdered by three non-Native men. The story is familiar to most of us. Our relatives—our aunties, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, grandparents, and even ourselves—are cast as outsiders, exiles in our own homelands in places we call border towns, the white-dominated settlements that ring Indian reservations where persistent patterns of police brutality, rampant discrimination, and violence against Natives define everyday life. The men who murdered Cowboy and Rabbit later admitted to committing similar violent acts against fifty others in a one-year period. They told investigators they were looking for a “good time,” and Native people were their playthings, just like the white boys in Farmington who attacked and murdered Navajo men “for fun” in what they call “Indian rolling,” or like how rich, racist white men like Dan Snyder, the owner of the infamous Washington football team, use Natives as playthings for entertainment and mascots that celebrate the scalping and mutilating of Native bodies.
Natives become entertainment objects for sport and killing because in this society we are unreal and not fully human. Cowboy and Rabbit’s killers spent more than an hour mutilating their bodies to the point they were unrecognizable. It was so bad authorities could not identify them and neither Cowboy nor Rabbit carried personal ID. All-too-common among Albuquerque’s unsheltered community, the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) confiscated and destroyed the men’s IDs—which included drivers’ licenses and CIB cards—to prevent them from buying alcohol or receiving basic human rights, such as access to housing, food, medical care, and employment. Even before they were killed, the APD and this settler society had marked and sentenced Cowboy and Rabbit to a certain kind of death, a social death, where they were excluded, like most Natives, from the realm of the living and relegated to a place where they were considered killable and disposable.
When we founded The Red Nation, this was our primary concern, to address the common experience of Natives: four of every five Natives lives off-reservation in border towns, which include places like Gallup, Farmington, Winslow, Albuquerque, Denver, Rapid City, and Phoenix, to name just a few. Why is this significant? Typically, Natives living off-reservation are considered unauthentic or somehow less Native. They are derisively referred to as “Urban Indians.” The truth is that reservations were created as open-air concentration camps, to contain and limit our movements across land that was rightfully ours.
Our ancestors did not choose reservation life; it was forced upon them. Natives who “went off the reservation” were the revolutionaries and rebels who refused confinement. In those days, those who willfully crossed the reservation borders were considered renegades, outlaws, or hostiles. They were usually hunted down, summarily shot, hanged, or imprisoned by law enforcement or by vigilantes. In other words, Natives off the reservation have always been deemed criminal, deviant, and in the way. Today, the recent police killings of Loreal Tsingine, Allen Locke, Sarah Lee Circle Bear, Jacquelyn Salyers, and many more are evidence that the criminalization and extermination of Native life is fundamental to settler society. And border towns literally thrive on Native death.
This is our common experience and our common struggle. This is why we formed The Red Nation.
In fact, police killings of Natives have increased in just the last year and some predict that number will double by the end of 2016, unless we take action now. Native women make up 30 percent of all the police killings of women just this year, even though Natives make up barely 1 percent of the national population. On top of this, Natives are killed by police at the highest rate. Some attempt to parse out these horrible statistics to suggest that Natives have it worse than other groups, as if being murdered by the police is a competition. The truth is that Natives, Blacks, and Latinxs have historically been the targets of the racist police state, the colonial system that enslaved Blacks for their labor, killed Indians for their land, and created a cheap, exploitable labor pool from Indigenous-descended people, now called Latinxs. And because of this reality . . . the Red Nation stands with all victims of police brutality. We recognize that undoing the system that oppresses everyone requires multinational unity and class solidarity among the racialized poor, colonized, and working-class peoples.
To understand why the Native struggle is essential, then, we must first begin with why Natives are targeted for elimination: to gain access to territory. Despite popular belief, Natives are not targeted and killed for our culture, spirituality, religion, or civilization. We are eliminated so that corporations and the settler state can gain access to our territory and resources. That requires the liquidation of our societies, the forced removal of our people from the land, the creation of a blood quantum system that dilutes our identity and decreases our population, the confinement to reservations or prisons, the breaking up of our land base and collective identities, and the hyper-policing of our people.
Elimination also requires that Natives in border towns like Albuquerque are seen as nuisances and are commonly referred to as “drunk Indians” or “transients.” Both stereotypes are criminalized, although by definition neither is illegal. Police and settlers often tell us to “Go back to the reservation!” or “You’re not from the community!” In those moments, Natives become a criminal element, as if we’re the ones who don’t belong. It’s what Native bodies off-reservation represent that makes us a threat. Native bodies off-reservation represent the unfinished business of settler colonialism; we’re physical reminders that this is not settler land—this is stolen Native land. Despite their best efforts to kill us off, confine us to sub-marginal plots of land, breed us white, or to beat or educate the Indian out of us, we remain. We remain because we resist.
We remain as evidence that this is still, and will always be, Native land. We represent a challenge to the legitimacy of the colonial project of border towns and cities because we refuse to quit being Indians when we leave the reservation. We refuse to obey colonial borders. We refuse to disappear and to be quiet.
The Red Nation represents the unification of Natives outside of the institutions of power—taking the struggle back where it belongs: in the hands of the people. Our ancestors did not establish corporate foundations and boards. They fought for their dignity, lands, and lives. They expect the same from us. Corporate and colonial state institutions still dominate our present condition and, as a result, they structure and contain the free will and humanity of Native people. We have to transcend these power structures that, by design and intention, ultimately limit and strangle our lives. To achieve this new humanity, we have to refuse the false promise of capitalistic development—which is commonly disguised as tribal economic self-determination—and state-sponsored colonial reconciliation—which is commonly disguised as community healing and individual self-fulfillment. You cannot heal from a system that continues to violate and kill the land and our relatives unless you dismantle that system. Although seductive, these “solutions” do nothing more than carry on, and carry out, the same power structure that Native people have been resisting for the last five centuries: colonialism and capitalism. The healing of our wounds can only happen if we annihilate profit-making and colonial enterprises.
Instead of nonprofits, we need anti-profits organizing independent of corporate influence and state co-optation, and embedded in the true power of every society: the common people. The poor. The oppressed. The marginalized. In the Lakota language, we call our common people ikce wicasa. In Native societies, our common people are those who face the highest rates of violence and discrimination: our youth, our women, our LGTBQ, and our poor relatives. In other words, the broad swath of Native societies today. This is the common experience of Native people.
The current landscape of struggle pits organizations and groups of people against each other, vying for control over resources made scarce by austerity measures and corporate monopolies. Our struggle is not for funding streams or profit-making off the misery of the powerless. We see how organizations and movements mimic corporate and bourgeois competition over brands, logos, name recognition, clientele, and power. We refuse to participate in this corporate model that dominates community organizing. Instead, we organize according to a principle of unity to unite Native peoples and all oppressed peoples in a common struggle beyond national borders and racial and gender identities. That’s what separates revolutionary organizing and Native liberation struggles from entities that pit marginalized populations against each other, to compete for funding and resources, without attacking the true source of our collective misery: colonialism and capitalism.
We share an enemy that we must unite against. This is the organizing philosophy of The Red Nation.
Capitalism is the enemy of all life. Climate change, because it envelops the entire planet, makes all life precarious. Poor, oppressed, and Indigenous peoples, however, bear the brunt of rising seas, record droughts, and abnormal weather patterns. As Native people, our kinship with human and nonhuman relatives is fundamental to our being. As I speak, an alliance of Lakota and non-Lakota are laying their bodies on the line to halt a crude oil pipeline from crossing the major fresh water source for millions on the Great Plains, the Missouri River. Our relatives and allies are enacting the sacred duty of the Lakota belief of Wotakuye, or kinship. Kinship, in this way, is unconditional because it is revolutionary love. It is the love for our human and nonhuman relatives and the love for the land that will always trump profit. But the land can no longer sustain us if capitalism continues to stalk the earth in search of new markets, bodies, and resources. For life to live on this planet, capitalism must die. For us Lakotas, it is the owe wasicu, the way of the fat-taker capitalist, that must die for our people to live.
The Great Spirits have declared: capitalism is organized crime and must be destroyed. It is our obligation to act accordingly.
As Native people, we possess an essential tradition to sustain us—a tradition of resistance. From this tradition of resistance arises The Red Nation. In Lakota, we call ourselves and all Native peoples, Oyate Luta, the Red Nation. We are red because we come from the red earth. We are a nation because we have our own laws, language, territory, and customs that have persisted since time immemorial. We claim the land and the land claims us. . . .
Four of five Natives do not live on reservation lands, but that doesn’t mean that they have relinquished their treaty rights or their sovereign political identities as Native peoples. It means that we exercise our rights to live where and how we want in our own homelands because that is the ultimate definition of self-determination and sovereignty, collective independence, and autonomy. It is important to remember that no people in the history of this world were ever granted their freedom by begging for it from their oppressors. They had to fight for it. They had to win it. Freedom is actualized not given. . . .
It is time to name the systems that kill us—capitalism and colonialism—and call for their destruction so that our people may live. We will not apologize for this, relatives. It is the only right thing left to do. The Red Nation is a movement for life, not death. And for us to live, capitalism and colonialism must die.
Join us in this movement for life!
In the spirit of Popé and in the spirit of Crazy Horse!
Hecetu Welo!
NICK ESTES is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is an Assistant Professor in the American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico. In 2014, he co-founded The Red Nation, an Indigenous resistance organization. For 2017-2018, Estes was the American Democracy Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.
Estes is the author of the book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019) and he co-edited Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (University of Minnesota, 2019), which draws together more than thirty contributors, including leaders, scholars, and activists of the Standing Rock movement.
Estes' journalism and writing is also featured in the Intercept, Jacobin, Indian Country Today, The Funambulist Magazine, and High Country News.
