Worthy and Unworthy Victims: An Excerpt from “The Greatest Evil is War” by Chris Hedges

September 20

by Seven Stories Press

To mark today's publication of The Greatest Evil is War — a new book by journalist Chris Hedges that presents unflinching indictment of the horror and obscenity of war — we are proud to present an excerpt from the text, in which Hedges differentiates between what he calls “worthy” and “unworthy” victims, highlighting the ways in which politicians and the media politicize the victims of war and imperial violence to better promote the dominant political narrative.

Worthy and Unworthy Victims

Rulers divide the world into worthy and unworthy victims, those we are allowed to pity, such as Ukrainians enduring the hell of modern warfare, and those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed, or ignored. The terror we and our allies carry out against Iraqi, Palestinian, Syrian, Libyan, Somali, and Yemeni civilians is part of the regrettable cost of war. We, echoing the empty promises from Moscow, claim we do not target civilians. Rulers always paint their militaries as humane, there to serve and protect. Collateral damage happens, but it is regrettable.

This lie can only be sustained among those who are unfamiliar with the explosive ordnance and large kill zones of missiles; iron fragmentation bombs; mortar, artillery, and tank shells; and belt-fed machine guns. This bifurcation into worthy and unworthy victims, as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, is a key component of propaganda, especially in war. The Russian-speaking population in Ukraine, to Moscow, are worthy victims. Russia is their savior. The millions of Ukrainian families cowering in basements and subways, or forced to flee Ukraine, are unworthy victims. Ukrainian fighters are condemned as “Nazis.”

Worthy victims allow citizens to see themselves as empathetic, compassionate, and just. Worthy victims are an effective tool to demonize the aggressor. They are used to obliterate nuance and ambiguity. Mention the provocations carried out by the Western alliance and you are dismissed as a Putin apologist. It is to taint the sainthood of the worthy victims, and by extension ourselves.

We are good. They are evil. Worthy victims are used not only to express sanctimonious outrage, but to stoke self-adulation and a poisonous nationalism. The cause becomes sacred, a religious crusade. Fact-based evidence is abandoned, as it was during the calls to invade Iraq. Charlatans, liars, con artists, fake defectors, and opportunists become experts, used to fuel the conflict.

Celebrities, who, like the powerful, carefully orchestrate their public image, pour out their hearts to worthy victims. Hollywood stars such as George Clooney made trips to Darfur to denounce the war crimes being committed by Khartoum at the same time the U.S. was killing scores of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. The war in Iraq was as savage as the slaughter in Darfur, but to express outrage at what was happening to unworthy victims was to become branded as the enemy.

Saddam Hussein’s attacks on the Kurds after the first Gulf War were considered worthy victims, while Israeli persecution of the Palestinians, subjected to relentless bombing campaigns by the Israeli air force, artillery and tank units, with hundreds of dead and wounded, were a footnote. At the height of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, worthy victims were the Republicans battling the fascists in the Spanish civil war. Soviet citizens were mobilized to send aid and assistance. Unworthy victims were the millions of people Stalin sent to the gulags, sometimes after tawdry show trials, and executed.

While I was reporting from El Salvador in 1984, the Catholic priest Jerzy Popiełuszko was murdered by the regime in Poland. His death was used to excoriate the Polish communist government, a stark contrast to the response of the Reagan administration to the rape and murder of four Catholic missionaries in 1980 in El Salvador by the Salvadoran National Guard. President Ronald Reagan’s administration sought to blame the three nuns and a lay worker for their own deaths. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, said, “The nuns were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists.” Secretary of State Alexander Haig speculated that “perhaps they ran a roadblock.” [10]

For the Reagan administration, the murdered churchwomen were unworthy victims. The right-wing government in El Salvador, armed and backed by the United States, joked at the time, Haz patria, mata un cura (Be a patriot, kill a priest). Archbishop Óscar Romero had been assassinated in March of 1980. Nine years later, the Salvadoran regime would gun down six Jesuits and two others at their residence on the campus of Central American University in San Salvador. Between 1977 and 1989, death squads and soldiers killed thirteen priests in El Salvador.

It is not that worthy victims do not suffer, nor that they are not deserving of our support and compassion; it is that worthy victims alone are rendered human, people like us, and unworthy victims are not. It helps, of course, when, as in Ukraine, they are white. But the missionaries murdered in El Salvador were also white and American, and yet it was not enough to shake U.S. support for the country’s military dictatorship.

“The mass media never explain why Andrei Sakharov is worthy and José Luis Massera, in Uruguay, is unworthy,” Herman and Chomsky write. They continue:

The attention and general dichotomization occur “naturally” as a result of the working of the filters, but the result is the same as if a commissar had instructed the media: “Concentrate on the victims of enemy powers and forget about the victims of friends.” Reports of the abuses of worthy victims not only pass through the filters; they may also become the basis of sustained propaganda campaigns. If the government or corporate community and the media feel that a story is useful as well as dramatic, they focus on it intensively and use it to enlighten the public.

This was true, for example, of the shooting down by the Soviets of the Korean Air Lines flight 007 in early September 1983, which permitted an extended campaign of denigration of an official enemy and greatly advanced Reagan administration arms plans. As Bernard Gwertzman noted complacently in the New York Times of August 31, 1984, U.S. officials “assert that worldwide criticism of the Soviet handling of the crisis has strengthened the United States in its relations with Moscow.” In sharp contrast, the shooting down by Israel of a Libyan civilian airliner in February 1973 led to no outcry in the West, no denunciations for “cold-blooded murder,” and no boycott. This difference in treatment was explained by the New York Times precisely on the grounds of utility in a 1973 editorial: “No useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame for the downing of a Libyan airliner in the Sinai Peninsula last week.” There was a very “useful purpose” served by focusing on the Soviet act, and a massive propaganda campaign ensued. [11]

It is impossible to hold those responsible for war crimes accountable if worthy victims are deserving of justice and unworthy victims are not. If Russia should be crippled with sanctions for invading Ukraine, which I believe it should, the United States should have been crippled with sanctions for invading Iraq, a war launched based on lies and fabricated evidence.

Imagine if America’s largest banks, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, were cut off from the international banking system. Imagine if our oligarchs, Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, as venal as Russian oligarchs, had their assets frozen and estates and luxury yachts seized. (Bezos’s yacht is the largest in the world, cost an estimated $500 million, and is about fifty-seven feet longer than a football field.) Imagine if leading political figures, such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and U.S. “oligarchs” were blocked from traveling under visa restrictions. Imagine if the world’s biggest shipping lines suspended shipments to and from the United States. Imagine if U.S. international media news outlets were forced off the air. Imagine if we were blocked from purchasing spare parts for our commercial airlines, and our passenger jets were banned from European air space. Imagine if our athletes were barred from hosting or participating in international sporting events. Imagine if our symphony conductors and opera stars were forbidden from performing unless they denounced the Iraq war and, in a kind of perverted loyalty oath, condemned George W. Bush.

The rank hypocrisy is stunning. Some of the same officials that orchestrated the invasion of Iraq, who under international law are war criminals for carrying out a preemptive war, are now chastising Russia for its violation of international law. The U.S. bombing campaign of Iraqi urban centers, called “Shock and Awe,” saw the dropping of 3,000 bombs on civilian areas that killed more than 7,000 noncombatants in the first two months of the war.

“I have argued that when you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime,” Harris Faulkner, a Fox News host said (with a straight face) to Condoleezza Rice, who served as Bush’s national security adviser during the Iraq War.

“It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order, and that is why throwing the book at them now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments is also a part of it,” Rice said. “And I think the world is there. Certainly, NATO is there. He’s managed to unite NATO in ways that I didn’t think I would ever see after the end of the Cold War.”

Rice inadvertently made a case for why she should be put on trial with the rest of Bush’s enablers. She famously justified the invasion of Iraq by stating: “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Her rationale for preemptive war, which under post-Nuremberg laws is a criminal war of aggression, is no different than that peddled by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who says the Russia invasion is being carried out to prevent Ukraine from obtaining nuclear weapons.

Only rarely is this hypocrisy exposed, as when U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the body: “We’ve seen videos of Russian forces moving exceptionally lethal weaponry into Ukraine, which has no place on the battlefield. That includes cluster munitions and vacuum bombs which are banned under the Geneva Convention.” Hours later, the official transcript of her remark was amended to tack on the words “if they are directed against civilians.” This is because the U.S., which like Russia never ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions treaty, regularly uses cluster munitions. It used them in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Iraq. It has provided them to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen. Russia has yet to come close to the tally of civilian deaths from cluster munitions delivered by the U.S. military.

And this brings me to RT America, where I had a show called On Contact. RT America is now off the air after being deplatformed and unable to disseminate its content. This was long the plan of the U.S. government. The invasion of Ukraine gave Washington the opening to shut RT down. The network had a tiny media footprint. But it gave a platform to American dissidents who challenged corporate capitalism, imperialism, war, and the American oligarchy.

My public denunciation of the invasion of Ukraine was treated very differently by RT America than my public denunciation of the Iraq war was treated by my former employer, the New York Times. RT America made no comment, publicly or privately, about my condemnation of the invasion of Ukraine in my ScheerPost column. Nor did RT comment about statements by Jesse Ventura, a Vietnam veteran and former Minnesota governor, who also had a show on RT America, and who wrote: “20 years ago, I lost my job because I opposed the Iraq War and the invasion of Iraq. Today, I still stand for peace. As I’ve said previously, I oppose this war, this invasion, and if standing up for peace costs me another job, so be it. I will always speak out against war.”

RT America was shut down six days after I denounced the invasion of Ukraine. If the network had continued, Ventura and I might have paid with our jobs, but at least for those six days they kept us on air.

The New York Times issued a formal written reprimand in 2003 that forbade me to speak about the war in Iraq, although I had been the newspaper’s Middle East Bureau Chief, had spent seven years in the Middle East, and was an Arabic speaker. This reprimand set me up to be fired. If I violated the prohibition, under guild rules, the paper had grounds to terminate my employment. John Burns, another foreign correspondent at the paper, publicly supported the invasion of Iraq. He did not receive a reprimand.

My repeated warnings in public forums about the chaos and bloodbath the invasion of Iraq would trigger, which turned out to be correct, was not an opinion. It was an analysis based on years of experience in the region, including in Iraq, and an intimate understanding of the instrument of war those in the Bush White House lacked. But it challenged the dominant narrative and was silenced. This same censorship of anti-war sentiment is happening now in Russia, but we should remember it happened here during the inception and initial stages of the invasion of Iraq.

Those of us who opposed the Iraq war, no matter how much experience we had in the region, were marginalized and vilified. Ventura, who had a three-year contract with MSNBC, saw his show canceled.

Those who were cheerleaders for the war, such as George Packer, Thomas Friedman, Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, and Nick Kristof, a group Tony Judt called “Bush’s useful idiots,” dominated the media landscape. They painted the Iraqis as oppressed, worthy victims, whom the U.S. military would set free. The plight of women under the Taliban was a rallying cry to bomb and occupy the country. These courtiers to power served the interests of the power elite and the war industry. They differentiated between worthy and unworthy victims. It was a good career move. And they knew it.

There was very little dispute about the folly of invading Iraq among reporters in the Middle East, but most did not want to jeopardize their positions by speaking publicly. They did not want my fate to become their own, especially after I was booed off a commencement stage in Rockford, Illinois, for delivering an anti-war speech and became a punching bag for right-wing media. I would walk through the newsroom and reporters I had known for years looked down or turned their heads as if I had leprosy. My career was finished. And not just at the New York Times but with any major media organization. This is where I was, orphaned, when Robert Scheer, who had lost his job as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times because of his opposition to the war, recruited me to write for the website Truthdig, which he then edited.

What Russia is doing militarily in Ukraine, at least up to now, was more than matched by our own savagery in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Vietnam. This is an inconvenient fact that the press, awash in moral posturing, will not address.

No one has mastered the art of technowar and wholesale slaughter like the U.S. military. When atrocities leak out, such as the massacre of more than five hundred unarmed villagers at My Lai in Vietnam or the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the press does its duty by branding them aberrations. The truth is that these killings and abuse are deliberate. They are orchestrated at the senior levels of the military. Infantry units, assisted by long-range artillery, fighter jets, heavy bombers, missiles, drones, and helicopters, level vast swaths of “enemy” territory, killing most of the inhabitants. The U.S. military, during the invasion of Iraq from Kuwait, created a six-mile-wide free-fire zone that killed hundreds if not thousands of Iraqis. The indiscriminate killing ignited the Iraqi insurgency.

When I entered southern Iraq in the first Gulf War, it was flattened. Villages and towns were smoldering ruins. Bodies of the dead, including women and children, lay scattered on the ground. Water purification systems had been bombed. Power stations had been bombed. Schools and hospitals had been bombed. Bridges had been bombed. The United States military always wages war by “overkill,” which is why it dropped the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs on Vietnam, most actually falling on the south, where our purported Vietnamese allies resided. It unloaded in Vietnam more than 70 million tons of herbicidal agents, three million rockets tipped with white phosphorus—which will burn its way entirely through a body—and an estimated 400,000 tons of jellied incendiary napalm. [12]

“Thirty-five percent of the victims,” Nick Turse wrote of the war in Vietnam, “died within 15 to 20 minutes.” Death from the skies, like death on the ground, was often unleashed capriciously. “It was not out of the ordinary for US troops in Vietnam to blast a whole village or bombard a wide area in an effort to kill a single sniper.” [13]

Vietnamese villagers, including women, children, and the elderly, were often herded into tiny barbed-wire enclosures known as “cow cages.” They were subjected to electric shocks, gang-raped, and tortured by being hung upside down and beaten—a practice euphemistically called “the plane ride”—until unconscious. Fingernails were ripped out. Fingers were dismembered. Detainees were slashed with knives. They were beaten senseless with baseball bats and waterboarded. Targeted assassinations, orchestrated by CIA death squads, were ubiquitous.

Wholesale destruction, including of human beings, is orgiastic. The ability to unleash sheets of automatic rifle fire, hundreds of rounds of belt-fed machine-gun fire, 90-mm tank rounds, endless grenades, mortars, and artillery shells on a village, sometimes supplemented by gigantic 2,700-pound explosive projectiles fired from battleships along the coast, was a perverted form of entertainment in Vietnam, as it became later in the Middle East. U.S. troops litter the countryside with claymore mines. These are our calling cards: canisters of napalm, daisy-cutter bombs, anti-personnel rockets, high-explosive rockets, incendiary rockets, cluster bombs, high-explosive shells, and iron fragmentation bombs—including the 40,000-pound bomb loads dropped by giant B-52 Stratofortress bombers—along with chemical defoliants and chemical gases dropped from the sky. Vast areas are designated free-fire zones (a term later changed by the military to the more neutral-sounding “specified strike zone”), in which everyone is considered the enemy, even the elderly, women, and children.

Soldiers and Marines who attempt to report the war crimes they witness can face a fate worse than being pressured, discredited, or ignored. On Sepember 12, 1969, as Nick Turse wrote in his book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, George Chunko sent a letter to his parents explaining how his unit had entered a home that had a young Vietnamese woman, four young children, an elderly man, and a military-age male inside. It appeared the younger man was AWOL from the South Vietnamese army. The young man was stripped naked and tied to a tree. His wife fell to her knees and begged the soldiers for mercy. The prisoner, Chunko wrote, was “ridiculed, slapped around and [had] mud rubbed into this face.” [14] He was then executed.

A day after he wrote the letter, Chunko was killed. Chunko’s parents, Turse wrote, “suspected that their son had been murdered to cover up the crime.” [15]

All of this remains unspoken as we express our anguish for the people of Ukraine and revel in our moral superiority. The life of a Palestinian or an Iraqi child is as precious as the life of a Ukrainian child. No one should live in fear and terror. No one should be sacrificed on the altar of Mars. But until all victims are worthy, until all who wage war are held accountable and brought to justice, this hypocritical game of life and death will continue. Some human beings will be worthy of life. Others will not. Drag Putin off to the International Criminal Court and put him on trial. But make sure George W. Bush is in the cell next to him. If we can’t see ourselves, we can’t see anyone else. And this blindness leads to catastrophe.

10. Cited in Raymond Bonner, “The Diplomat and the Killer,” The Atlantic, February 11, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/02/el-salvador-churchwomen-murders/460320/.

11. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 32.

12. Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013), 79.

13. Ibid., 91.

14. Ibid., 224–225.

15. Ibid., 226.

Drawn from experience and interviews by Pulitzer-prize-winner Chris Hedges, this book looks at the hidden costs of war, what it does to individuals, families, communities and nations.

In fifteen short chapters, Chris Hedges astonishes us with his clear and cogent argument against war, not on philosophical grounds or through moral arguments, but in an irrefutable stream of personal encounters with the victims of war, from veterans and parents to gravely wounded American serviceman who served in the Iraq War, to survivors of the Holocaust, to soldiers in the Falklands War, among others. Hedges reported from Sarajevo, and was in the Balkans to witness the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In 2002 he published War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, which the Los Angeles Times described as “the best kind of war journalism… bitterly poetic and ruthlessly philosophical” and the New York Times called “a brilliant, thoughtful, timely, and unsettling book.” In the twenty years since, Hedges has not wanted to write another book on the subject of war — until now, with the outbreak of war in Ukraine. It is important again to be reminded who are the victors of the spoils of war and of other unerring truths, not only in this war but in all modern wars, where civilians are always the main victims, and the tools and methods of war are capable of so much destruction it boggles the mind. This book is an unflinching indictment of the horror and obscenity of war by one of our finest war correspondents.

CHRIS HEDGES was a war correspondent for two decades in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, including fifteen years with the New York Times, where he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of fourteen books, including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and his latest, Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison. The passages in this book are taken from his writings on war, primarily from Truthdig and ScheerPost, over the past twenty years, as well as from numerous talks and lectures. He writes a column every Monday for ScheerPost and has a show, The Chris Hedges Report, on The Real News. He holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard University and has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto. He has taught students earning their college degree from Rutgers University in the New Jersey prison system since 2010. You can find him at chrishedges.substack.com.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
BY MONICA CURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Monica Cure
Bucharest, April 2024

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

October 25

Gary Indiana (1950 - 2024)

Gary Indiana, photographed by Hedi El Kholti

REMEMBERING GARY INDIANA
(1950 - 2024)

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

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

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

October 22

Media Literacy 101 - Take 30% off our Media Literacy Reading List

September 06

Announcing “Sad Tiger” by Neige Sinno (tr. Natasha Lehrer)

Cover Design by Stewart Cauley

Sad Tiger (Triste tigre), the acclaimed multi-award-winning literary sensation by Neige Sinno, has been acquired by Seven Stories Press for publication in English in March 2025.

Winner of the Prix Femina and the Goncourt des Lycéens in 2023 and the European Strega Prize in 2024, Neige Sinno has created a powerful new literary form.

Annie Ernaux says, “Reading Triste tigre is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it. Especially teenagers. . . it is the most powerful, profound book I’ve ever read about the devastation of one person’s childhood by an adult.” (Nobel Prize winner in Literature 2022, in the New York Times, 11/26/2023)

Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, will be published in the United States and United Kingdom by Seven Stories Press in March 2025. The book was released by P.O.L. in France in 2023 and was the literary phenomenon of French publishing that year, selling over 300,000 copies and with foreign language rights sold in over twenty countries.

In the book — the title inspired by William Blake’s poem "The Tyger" — Sinno tells how she was repeatedly exposed to sexual violence as a child and describes the consequences this experience has imposed on her adult life, on the way she perceives the world, reality, others, and art. Sad Tiger is a work of literature created by weaving years of trauma with an investigation of the limits of both language and imagination, critically examining texts by Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, Annie Ernaux, and Virginie Despentes among others. In trying to write the unthinkable, Sinno offers the reader the opportunity to explore a realm where our thoughts seldom go. And even if the realm itself is dark, the fact that we can bravely navigate through it with our intelligence intact, creates a remarkable reading experience.

Since its publication in French, Sad Tiger (Triste tigre) has won over a dozen literary prizes including the Prix Femina, the European Strega Prize, the Prix Médicis, the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, and the US and UK Goncourt Prizes. It was also shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt.

Seven Stories publisher Dan Simon calls Triste Tigre “a shocking, and necessary masterpiece.”

Complete list of prizes to date for the original French edition, Triste Tigre:

Winner of the European Strega Prize, 2024
Winner of the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, 2023
Winner of the Prix Femina, 2023
Winner of the US and UK Goncourt Prize Selection, 2024
Winner of the Le Monde Literary Prize, 2023
Winner of the Inrockuptibles Prize, 2023
Shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, 2023
Shortlisted for the Prix Medicis , 2023
Shortlisted for the Prix Decembre Prize, 2023
Shortlisted for the Prix Wepler, 2023
Shortlisted for the Prix Flore, 2023
Winner of the Goncourt Prizes in Belgium, Slovakia, India, Turkey, Tunisia, and South Korea, 2023

“[A] forensic exploration of how to speak about the unspeakable and how to define the domain of the unspeakable” —Natasha Lehrer, The Times Literary Supplement

"The most extraordinary book of the literary season . . . Exceptionally intelligent and truthful, Triste tigre is a must-read." —Elle

NEIGE SINNO is a French writer who has studied American literature in the United States and Mexico and has worked as a translator and professor of literature. She is the author of two previous books of fiction, Le Camion and La Vie des rats and a literary essay on reading: Lectores entre líneas: Roberto Bolaño, Ricardo Piglia y Sergio Pitol (winner of the Lya Kostakowsky Hispano-American literary essay prize). Born in France, she has lived in Mexico for the past 20 years. Her 2023 book, Triste tigre, won several of France’s top literary prizes and became the publishing sensation of the year. It will be published by Seven Stories Press, in a translation by Natasha Lehrer, in April 2025.

NATASHA LEHRER is a prizewinning writer and translator. She writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, the Observer, and The Guardian, among many others, and translated works by Chantal Thomas, Vanessa Springora, Amin Maalouf, Victor Segalen, Robert Desnos, and Georges Bataille. In 2016 she was awarded the Scott Moncrieff prize for Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger. She lives in France.

SAD TIGER
By Neige Sinno
Translated by Natasha Lehrer
$22.95 | Trade paperback original | 288 pp | 5-1/2 x 8-1/4”
March 25, 2025 US
March 27, 2025 SSP-UK
9781644214671

Winner of multiple prizes, Neige Sinno has created a powerful literary form with Sad Tiger, a book that took France by storm and is an international phenomenon.

“Reading Sad Tiger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it. Especially teenagers.” —Annie Ernaux

Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was 7 years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her and at 14 or 15 the abuse stopped. At 19, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather and Sinno started a new life in Mexico.

Through the construction of a fragmented narrative, woven together with documents and thoughts like a peculiar personal investigation, Sinno explores the different facets of memory — her own, her mother’s, as well as her abusive stepfather’s; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. Her account is woven together with a close reading of literary works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes among others.

Sad Tiger — the title inspired by William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” — is a literary exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. In this extraordinary book there is an abiding concern: how to protect others from what the author herself endured? In the midst of so much darkness, an answer reads crystal clear: by speaking up and asking questions. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece.

August 27

Excerpt: Entering History — Paco Ignacio Taibo II on Pancho Villa

Pancho Villa and staff riding near the US border. Ca. 1912.

ZERO: ENTERING HISTORY

I

This is the story of a man who almost always got out of bed in a different place from where he had gone to sleep. He developed this strange habit because — for more than half his adult life, seventeen out of the thirty years before he joined the Revolution — he had been an outlaw, a fugitive from justice, a gunslinger, a thief, a bandit, a cattle rustler. And he feared the night’s vulnerable hours would be his perdition.

A man who felt uncomfortable bareheaded, who had in his youth earned the nickname el Gorra Chueca (Crooked Hat) because he rarely removed his hat, not even to make or return a greeting. After years of research, Villa and his hats became fused in the mind’s eye of this biography’s author, an impression confirmed by Martín Luis Guzmán in The Eagle and the Serpent, “Villa wore his hat [. . .] frequently even when he was in his office or at home.” To provide scientific backing for the matter, this narrator reviewed 217 photographs. In these, Villa appears without a hat in only twenty. Many of these are in situations in which going hatless was almost obligatory: in one, he is swimming, in another four, he is at a funeral or a wake, and in a few others, he is already deceased — his hat having fallen to the ground during the fatal firefight. In the remaining 197 photos, he wears all kinds of hats. There are simple Texan Stetsons, cowboy hats, Federale army hats with visors, enormous huaripas norteños with wide brims and tall crowns, huicholes, broad-brim woven hats, three-cornered texanos, pith helmets, and military visor caps known in those days as “Russians.” His love for hats went so far that, once when he had to conceal his identity, he secured a bowler hat that made him look like a “village priest.”

This is the story of a man whose fighting methods were said to have been studied by Rommel (false), Mao Zedong (false), and Subcomandante Marcos (true); who recruited Tom Mix to the Mexican Revolution (highly improbable, but not impossible), who was photographed next to George Patton (though there’s not much to this as George was then a lowly lieutenant), who hooked up with María Conesa, the most important diva in Mexican history (false, he tried, but failed), and who killed Ambrose Bierce (absolutely false). A man who composed “La Adelita” (false), even if the lyrics to the “Corrido de la Muerte de Pancho Villa” claim that he did, while attributing “La Cucaracha” to him as well . . . but he did no such thing. A man who was a contemporary of Lenin, Freud, Kafka, Houdini, Modigliani, and Gandhi but who had never heard of them. And if he had— because sometimes he read the papers—he probably didn’t assign them the least importance because they were alien to the territory that defined Villa’s whole world: a small strip of the planet stretching from the cities along the border with Texas all the way to Mexico City (which he didn’t like at all). A man who was married (or entered into close, almost marital relationships) twenty-seven times—and who had at least twenty-six children (according to my incomplete inquiries)—but who didn’t seem to be excessively fond of weddings or priests, preferring parties, dancing, and, above all else, his friends and comrades.

A character famous for his drinking, even though he hardly ever touched alcohol, sentenced drunken officers to death, and destroyed barrels of alcoholic beverages in the various cities he controlled. Ciudad Juárez reeked of liquor when he ordered all drink in the bars be poured out into the streets. A man who loved strawberry milkshakes, peanut brittle, queso asadero, canned asparagus, and meat cooked over the fire until it was as tough as shoe leather.

A man with at least three “autobiographies,” none of which he wrote.

A person who barely knew how to read and write but who established more than fifty schools when he was the governor of Chihuahua.

A man who, during the era of the machine gun and trench warfare, deployed the cavalry in combination with nighttime attacks, airplanes, and trains. Etched in Mexico’s memory are the plumes of smoke rising from hundreds of trains conveying the Division of the North towards Zacatecas.

An individual who, despite describing himself as a simple man, loved sewing machines, motorcycles, and tractors.

A revolutionary with the mind of a bank robber who, while a general leading a division of 30,000 men, took time to hide treasure in dollars, silver, and gold in caves and basements, buried in clandestine locations, treasures with which he would later buy ammunitions for his army in a country that did not manufacture bullets.

A person who began by rustling cattle but then created the most spectacular contraband network at the service of a revolution.

A citizen who, in 1916, proposed the death penalty for anyone who committed electoral fraud, a rare phenomenon in Mexican history.

The only Mexican who almost bought a submarine, who rode a magic stallion named Siete Leguas (in reality, his horse was a mare), and who fulfilled the dreams of the narrator’s future generation by escaping from the Tlatelolco military prison.

A man who was hated so intensely that his enemies pumped 150 bullets into the car in which he was killed and whose head they stole from his body three years after his assassination. A man who managed to deceive his persecutors even after death because, although he officially lay at rest in the Monument of the Revolution in Mexico City — a sullen pile of rock lacking in any grace that appears to celebrate the death of a revolution crushed under the weight of fifty years of betrayal — he was actually buried in Parral. This is the story, then, of a man who told stories and about whom stories were told, including the stories he told about himself, in so many and such a wide variety of versions that it sometimes seems impossible to disentangle them.

The historian can do nothing less than study this character with fascination.

II

In the memories of those who survived, the cattle were bigger, the mountains were taller, the plains were wider, the hunger was worse, and the water scarcer, while the fear was merely fleeting. It’s not that those telling the stories are exaggerating; it’s that those who are listening have very little to go on. The narrator has attempted to listen while enveloped in the endless and grandiose rumors arising from Villismo, and from the figure of Pancho himself. Sometimes the narrator feels he has achieved this goal, but not always.

José María Jaurrieta, who accompanied Villa for three years during his guerrilla phase, explained, “If the reader has spent any time in the countryside, especially at night, when loneliness is at its most desperate, they will know the supreme power of the campfire in bringing men together and making them talk.”

Villa told his stories hundreds of times around the campfire, in the dead hours of the night, during long train rides, over endless marches. And those who heard Villa’s stories told others what he had told them. And they told others too. And we are still telling those stories today.

Pancho Villa spoke as if he knew that he would be the subject of passionate public adoration and festering bourgeois hatred, while providing unparalleled material for novels that would never be written. Yet this is not the case; he did not possess a predetermined historical consciousness, rather, his was the simple passion of a master storyteller who knew that credibility lies in the details and that every story either gets better or worse with the retelling, but that there is no obligation whatsoever for each version to sound the same. History does not exist, only stories.

Every storyteller knows that at the end of the day authenticity, the apparent plausibility of his ephemeral and personal truth, lies in the details. Not in what he says — in phrases that might become the property of what is called history — but in how he describes the ring with a fake red stone wagging on someone’s finger, how he talks about the color of their boots. The storyteller knows that exact numbers are essential: 321 men, 11 stallions, and a mare, February 28; that this supposedly precise exactitude, even if untrue, ties the story together, solidifies it, fixes it in the gallery of the real truth.

It is well known that the most frequently repeated stories are not necessarily the most verifiable ones, they are merely that, the most repeated ones. And it is just as obvious that over the course of a long life, a person will be many people, with echoes of each crossing paths with what they are, or what they seem to be.

The author of this book knows and respects these forms of recovering the past. However, beyond this, it is difficult to create history out of these materials. Thus, just as often as he has opted to try to establish “what really happened,” he has just as many times left it up to the reader to decide for themselves, or to enjoy—along with the author — moving between narratives that are oftentimes contradictory. This is why throughout history there are so many versions that do not harmonize in their details.

While writing this book, the narrator suffered and quarreled with the marvelous universe of Villista storytellers and “liars” who were kicked out of the official history, only to find their way back into social and popular history by the glorious paths of tall tales, anecdotes, oral tradition, and legend.

Villa’s opponents were no more truthful, but they relied on, and they continue to rely on, fraudulent documentation, exaggerated military reports (that remain hidden in the archives), clouds of smoke that obscure, official silences, compulsory versions, and professional historians. That is, they lie from positions of power.

III

Villismo — and Villa, in particular — generate dual appreciations that are, even among his admirers, in the best case, condescending. A combination of admiration, repulsion, fascination, fear, love, and hate. For the twenty-first century civilized (rare enough) observer, Villa’s thirst for social revenge, his furor, his contempt for his own life and those of others, and his terrible affinity for violence can be disconcerting and frightening. Going in search of Villa as Robin Hood but finding Long John Silver is usually dangerous. It’s much better to simply tell his story.

For those who would like the past to work like the Bible, or provide a road map, a clear moral, a manual to correct present wrongs, this is the wrong book. The past is a chaotic story that is read contentiously from today’s point of view. This fact obliges an even moderately intelligent historian to describe the past, not to judge it, to chew it over, to put it in such an order as to manipulate information to make it conform to a hypothesis. Most important of all, it must not be censored, so that the reader may form their own interpretation, judge history for themselves, and decide upon affinity, love, or reprobation. This is the reader’s responsibility. We start from the assumption that Pancho Villa himself does not deserve a prettified version, neither does this author who dedicated four years to this work, and finally, neither does the reader.

IV

In this work photographs have been treated like informational material and not like illustrations and, therefore, are irregularly distributed throughout, concentrated at certain moments in the life of its principal character and practically absent at others.

Literature covering the Revolution has been used in the same manner, trying to separate fact from fiction (Campobello, Rafael F. Muñoz, Azuela, Martín Luis Guzmán). However, it is rarely possible to do so with certainty because of the abundance of source material and the impact of subjective considerations and impressions which are hidden in both the facts and the fiction, as will be the case in the following pages.

Lamentably, Villa’s voice, which appears frequently in the text in between quotation marks, is not completely his own; rather, many times it is the voice given to him by his secretaries, his biographers, and his scribes.

Canonized as one of the greatest military commanders of all time, Pancho Villa used calvary charges to rout superior armies in battle after battle, turning the tide in campaigns that kept the dream of the Mexican revolution alive even after its founding principles had been betrayed. Here in this magisterial biography of Villa, novelist, biographer, historian, and crime fiction writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II presents a new vision of Villa not only as a master of war but also as the living incarnation of the revolutionary hopes of a great nation. Taibo’s irreverent and conversational style, together with his deep research, make Pancho Villa a major advance in our understanding of the Mexican revolution and its most explosive leader. Until now, Villa has been defined and interpreted mostly by his enemies. Here, for the first time, he finds himself among friends.

July 10

Excerpt: I Can Give You Anything But Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

GARY INDIANA is a novelist and critic who has chronicled the despair and hysteria of America in the late twentieth century. From Horse Crazy (1989), a tale of feverish love set against the backdrop of downtown New York amid the AIDS epidemic, to Do Everything in the Dark (2003), "a desolate frieze of New York's aging bohemians" (n+1), Indiana's novels mix horror and bathos, grim social commentary with passages of tenderest, frailest desire. With 1997's Resentment: A Comedy, Indiana began his true crime trilogy, following up with Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (1999) and Depraved Indifference (2002). Together, the three novels show the most vicious crimes in our nation's history to be only American pathologies personified. In 2015, Indiana published his acclaimed anti-memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love and later the novel Gone Tomorrow. Called one of "the most brilliant critics writing in America today" by the London Review of Books, "the punk poet and pillar of lower-Manhattan society" by Jamaica Kincaid, and "one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche" by the Guardian, Gary Indiana remains both inimitable and impossible to pin down.

July 05

Honoring Stanley Moss (June 21, 1925 – July 5, 2024)

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

—Dan Simon

June 24

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May 31

What Every Radical Should Know About State Repression

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

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

WHAT EVERY RADICAL SHOULD KNOW ABOUT STATE REPRESSION

INTRODUCTION TO THE 2005 EDITION

BY DALIA HASHAD

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

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

People have been here before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Repression,” Serge comments, “can really only live off fear.” But that is not the end of the matter as he goes on to ask: “But is fear enough to remove need, thirst for justice, intelligence, reason, idealism—all those revolutionary forces that express the formidable, profound impulse of the economic factors of a revolution? Relying on intimidation, the reactionaries forget that they will cause more indignation, more hatred, more thirst for martyrdom, than real fear. They only intimidate the weak; they exasperate the best forces and temper the resolution of the strongest.”

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

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

Dalia Hashad
New York, 2005

Worthy and Unworthy Victims: An Excerpt from “The Greatest Evil is War” by Chris Hedges

September 20

by Seven Stories Press

Worthy and Unworthy Victims

“The mass media never explain why Andrei Sakharov is worthy and José Luis Massera, in Uruguay, is unworthy,” Herman and Chomsky write. They continue:

“I have argued that when you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime,” Harris Faulkner, a Fox News host said (with a straight face) to Condoleezza Rice, who served as Bush’s national security adviser during the Iraq War.

RT America was shut down six days after I denounced the invasion of Ukraine. If the network had continued, Ventura and I might have paid with our jobs, but at least for those six days they kept us on air.

Those of us who opposed the Iraq war, no matter how much experience we had in the region, were marginalized and vilified. Ventura, who had a three-year contract with MSNBC, saw his show canceled.

What Russia is doing militarily in Ukraine, at least up to now, was more than matched by our own savagery in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Vietnam. This is an inconvenient fact that the press, awash in moral posturing, will not address.

A day after he wrote the letter, Chunko was killed. Chunko’s parents, Turse wrote, “suspected that their son had been murdered to cover up the crime.” [15]

10. Cited in Raymond Bonner, “The Diplomat and the Killer,” The Atlantic, February 11, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/02/el-salvador-churchwomen-murders/460320/.

11. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 32.

12. Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013), 79.

13. Ibid., 91.

14. Ibid., 224–225.

15. Ibid., 226.

The Greatest Evil is War

Most Dangerous, Most Unmerciful

At War with War: 5000 Years of Conquests, Invasions, and Terrorist Attacks, An Illustrated Timeline

Terrorism and War

Howard Zinn on War

Terrorism: Theirs & Ours

Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTE BY MONICA CURE

—Monica Cure Bucharest, April 2024

Gary Indiana, photographed by Hedi El Kholti

REMEMBERING GARY INDIANA (1950 - 2024)

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

Cover Design by Stewart Cauley

Pancho Villa and staff riding near the US border. Ca. 1912.

ZERO: ENTERING HISTORY

I

II

III

IV

. . .

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

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

—Dan Simon

BOOKS FOR KIDS

BOOKS FOR TEENS

WHAT EVERY RADICAL SHOULD KNOW ABOUT STATE REPRESSION

INTRODUCTION TO THE 2005 EDITION

BY DALIA HASHAD

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
BY MONICA CURE

—Monica Cure
Bucharest, April 2024

REMEMBERING GARY INDIANA
(1950 - 2024)