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.

EXPLORE MORE BOOKS ON SALE

SELECT FICTION ON SALE

Lee Stringer by Cheung Ching-Ming

How To Survive: About my indomitable friend Lee, and what happens to the writers you don't see on the picket line

A note from writer Peter Blauner, originally published on his Substack newsletter Slow Motion Riot.

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.

https://gofund.me/a9e6a16b

—Peter Blauner, Slow Motion Riot

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?

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.

To celebrate his birthday, take 30% off all books written by or about Nelson Algren!

One of the most neglected American writers and also one of the best loved, NELSON ALGREN wrote once that “literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.” His writings always lived up to that definition.

He was born on March 28, 1909, in Detroit and lived mostly in Chicago. His first short fiction was published in Story magazine in 1933. In 1935 he published his first novel, Somebody in Boots. In early 1942, Algren put the finishing touches on a second novel and joined the war as an enlisted man. By 1945, he still had not made the grade of Private first class, but the novel Never Come Morning was widely praised and eventually sold over a million copies. In 1947 came The Neon Wilderness, his famous short story collection which would permanently establish his place in American letters.

The Man with the Golden Arm, generally considered Algren’s most important novel, appeared in 1949 and became the first winner of the National Book Award for Fiction in March 1950. Then came Chicago: City on the Make (1951), a prose poem, and A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), a rewrite of Somebody in Boots.

Algren also published two travel books, Who Lost an American? and Notes from a Sea Voyage. The Last Carousel, a collection of short fiction and nonfiction, appeared in 1973. He died on May 9, 1981, within days of his appointment as a fellow of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

His last novel, The Devil’s Stocking, based on the life of Hurricane Carter, and Nonconformity: Writing on Writing, a 1952 essay on the art of writing, were published posthumously in 1983 and 1996 respectively. In 2009 came Entrapment and Other Writings, a major collection of previously unpublished writings that included two early short story masterpieces, “Forgive Them, Lord,” and “The Lightless Room,” and the long unfinished novel fragment referenced in the book’s title. In 2019, Blackstone Audio released the complete library of Algren’s books as audiobooks. And in 2020 Olive Films released Nelson Algren Live, a performance film of Algren’s life and work starring Willem Dafoe and Barry Gifford, among others, produced by the Seven Stories Institute. 

Foreword by Colin Asher
Introduction by James R. Giles

A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm describes the dissolution of a card-dealing WWII veteran named Frankie Machine, caught in the act of slowly cutting his own heart into wafer-thin slices. For Frankie, a murder committed may be the least of his problems.

The literary critic Malcolm Cowley called The Man with the Golden Arm “Algren’s defense of the individual,” while Carl Sandburg wrote of its “strange midnight dignity.” A literary tour de force, here is a novel unlike any other, one in which drug addiction, poverty, and human failure somehow suggest a defense of human dignity and a reason for hope.

Seven Stories Press separately publishes the critical edition of The Man with the Golden Arm, the first critical edition of an Algren work, featuring an extra 100+ pages of insightful essays by Russell Banks, Bettina Drew, James R. Giles, Carlo Rotella, William Savage, Lee Stringer, Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, and others.

Introduction by Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Wright
Afterword by Daniel Simon 
Contribution by H.E.F. Donahue

Never Come Morning is unique among the novels of Algren. The author's only romance, the novel concerns Bruno Bicek, a would-be boxer from Chicago's Northwest side, and Steffi, the woman who shares his dream while living his nightmare. "It is an unusual and brilliant book," said The New York Times. "A bold scribbling upon the wall for comfortable Americans to ponder and digest." This new edition features an introduction by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and an interview with Nelson Algren by H.E.F. Donohue.

Foreword by Colin Asher 
Introduction by Tom Carson 
Afterword by Studs Terkel 

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.

Among the stories included here are "A Bottle of Milk for Mother," about a Chicago youth being cornered for a murder, and "The Face on the Barroom Floor," in which a legless man pummels another man nearly to death—the seeds that would grow into the novel Never Come Morning.

Also collected are the World War II stories that found their final expression in the novel The Man with the Golden Arm, as well as “So Help Me,” Algren’s first published work, and "The Captain Has Bad Dreams," in which Algren first introduced the character of the blameless captain who feels such a heavy burden of guilt and wonders why the criminal offenders he sees seem to feel no guilt at all. And then there is "Design for Departure," in which a young woman drifting into hooking and addiction sees her own dreaminess outlast her hopes.

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."

Edited by Brooke Horvath and Dan Simon

Nelson Algren sought humanity in the urban wilderness of postwar America, where his powerful voice rose from behind the billboards and down tin-can alleys, from among the marginalized and ignored, the outcasts and scapegoats, the punks and junkies, the whores and down-on-their luck gamblers, the punch-drunk boxers and skid-row drunkies and kids who knew they'd never reach the age of twenty-one: all of them admirable in Algren’s eyes for their vitality and no-bullshit forthrightness, their insistence on living and their ability to find a laugh and a dream in the unlikeliest places.

In Entrapment and Other Writings—containing his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays—Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and ’50s do, in part because he hasn’t yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon despite that he is held up as a talismanic figure.

The fiction and reportage included in The Last Carousel, one of the final collections published during Nelson Algren's lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world, and includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of Algren's beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects. In this collection, not just Algren's intensity but his diverse range of interests are revealed and celebrated. 

Foreword by Herbert Mitgang

The Devil's Stocking is the story of Ruby Calhoun, a boxer accused of murder in a shadowy world of low-purse fighters, cops, con artists, and bar girls. Chronicling a battle for truth and human dignity which gives way to a larger story of life and death decisions, literary grandmaster Nelson Algren's last novel is a fitting capstone to a long and brilliant career.

Afterword by Dan Simon

Notes by Dan Simon and C. S. O’Brien

Nonconformity is about 20th-century America: "Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder." It is also about the trouble writers ask for when they try to describe America: "Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards … [where there] are still … defeats in which everything is lost [and] victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope."

In Nonconformity, Nelson Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer's relation to society, drawing examples from Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Twain, and Fitzgerald, as well as utility infielder Leo Durocher and legendary barkeep Martin Dooley. He shares his deepest beliefs about the state of literature and its role in society, along the way painting a chilling portrait of the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy's heyday, when many American writers were blacklisted and ruined for saying similar things to what Algren says here. 

Nelson Algren’s two books of travel writing describe his journeys through the seamier side of the international social and political landscape of the mid-1960s.

Algren at Sea brings both books together in one volume on the centenary of Algren’s birth.

Aboard the freighter Malaysia Mail in Notes From a Sea Diary, Algren offers a gritty account of his time among his down-and-out fellow sailors and the underground port life of Kowloon, Bombay, Pusan—yet an account softened by his discussion of Hemingway, Hemingway’s attitude toward the world of literature (and the world of literature’s attitude toward Hemingway), and the role of a writer in modern America.

Who Lost an American? takes us on a whirlwind spin from the world of the New York literary scene to Dublin, Crete, Paris, Seville, and more, with Algren commenting on everything from Simone de Beauvoir to bullfights to Playboy key clubs to the death of Brendan Behan—and, as always, Chicago, Algren’s eternal touchstone of American brutality.

Foreword by David Mamet

They met in 1949 when Art was a reporter for Life. Shay followed Algren around with a camera, gathering pictures for a photo-essay piece he was pitching to the magazine. Life didn't pick up the article, but Shay and Algren became fast friends. Algren gave Shay's camera entrance into the back-alley world of Division Street, and Shay captured Algren's poetry on film. They were masters chronicling the same patch of ground with different tools. Chicago's Nelson Algren is the compilation of hundreds of photos—many recently discovered and published here for the first time—of Nelson Algren over the course of a decade and a deeply moving homage to the writer and his city. Read Algren and you'll see Shay's pictures; look at Shay's photos and you'll hear Nelson's words.