Read Adrienne Rich’s preface to MANIFESTO: “Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Che Guevara”

April 11

by Seven Stories Press

The three texts this book, classic writings by four famous revolutionaries —The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Marx and Engels, Reform or Revolution (1899) by Rosa Luxemburg and Socialism and Man in Cuba (1965) by Ernesto Che Guevara — illuminate a shared socialist ideology that spans two centuries. Here are urgent conversations from the past that are still being carried on, among new voices, throughout the world.

PREFACE TO MANIFESTO

“KARL MARX, ROSA LUXEMBURG, AND CHE GUEVARA”

BY ADRIENNE RICH

If you are curious and open to the life around you, if you are troubled as to why, how and by whom political power is held and used, if you sense there must be good intellectual reasons for your unease, if your curiosity and openness drive you toward wishing to act with others, to “do something,” you already have much in common with the writers of the three essays in this book.

The essays in Manifesto were written by three relatively young people — Karl Marx when he was 30, Rosa Luxemburg at 27, Che Guevara at the age of 37. Born into different historical moments and different generations, they shared an energy of hope, an engagement with history, a belief that critical thinking must inform action, and a passion for the world and its human possibilities. That society as it was materially constructed would have to undergo radical change in order for such possibilities, stifled or denied under existing conditions, to be realized, all three affirmed in their lives and work. They were educated, reflective people who sharpened their thinking powers on that endeavor.

Marx lived most of his prodigiously creative life in poverty and exile. Rosa Luxemburg and Che Guevara were targeted and assassinated for their intellectual and active leadership in socialist movements. Any one of them might have led the life of a relatively comfortable professional. Each made a different choice. Yet reading what they wrote, including the essays in this book, one feels not the grimness of a tooth-gritting, dogma-driven politics, but the verve and exuberance of mind that accompanies creative indignation. For all three, feeling intensely alive translated into the vision of an integrated society, in which each person could become both individuated and socially responsible: “an association,” as a famous phrase from The Communist Manifesto expresses it, “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” [1] Or, as Che told a group of Cuban medical students and health workers in 1960:

The revolution is not, as some claim, a standardizer of collective will, of collective initiative. To the contrary, it is a liberator of human beings’ individual capacity.

What the revolution does do, however, is to orient that capacity. [2]

None of them was thinking in isolation or in a historical vacuum. They had the past and its earlier thinkers to learn from and critique; they observed and participated in social movements; they worked out and argued ideas and strategies, sometimes fiercely, with comrades (Marx especially with Friedrich Engels, Luxemburg with Leo Jogiches, Clara Zetkin, Karl Kautsky and others of the German Social Democratic Party, Che Guevara with Fidel Castro, other Latin Americans and with leaders of the “nonaligned” nations). They saw themselves not as “public intellectuals” but as witnesses of and contributors to the growing consciousness of a class which produced wealth and leisure without sharing in it, a class fully capable of reason and enlightened action, though often lacking the formal education that could lead to political power.

That the working people who produced the wealth of the world could move toward political and economic emancipation, they did not simply believe but saw as a necessary evolution in human history. Revolutions were all around them, mass movements, strikes, international organizing. But it was not just the temper of their times that drew them into activity. (Many professionals and writers, especially when young, have been attracted by a moment’s flaring promise of social change, only to pull back as the windchill of opposition begins to freeze the air.) Rather, they observed around them the accelerating relationship between private wealth and massive suffering, capital’s devouring appetite for expansion of its markets at whatever human cost (including its wars); and in that awareness they also saw the meaning of their lives.

As a young medical student traveling through Latin America, Che Guevara noted this concretely:

I went to see an old woman with asthma… The poor thing was in a pitiful state, breathing the acrid smell of concentrated sweat and dirty feet that filled her room, mixed with the dust from a couple of armchairs, the only luxury items in her house. On top of her asthma, she had a heart condition. It is at times like this, when a doctor is conscious of his complete powerlessness, that he longs for change: a change to prevent the injustice of a system in which only a month ago this poor woman was still earning her living as a waitress, wheezing and panting but facing life with dignity. [3]

It was Marx first of all who described how capital not only dispossesses and forces the vast majority of people “to sell themselves piecemeal,” but contains, ultimately, its own undoing:

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells. [4]

But he first lays forth an exposition of the history of capitalism, the emergence of bourgeois or owning-class power and the effects of that power, a panorama so prescient of 21st century social conditions that it transcends its own moment of writing. As Che was to observe in 1964:

The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamic, foresees the future. But in addition to foreseeing it (by which he would meet his scientific obligation), he expresses a revolutionary concept: it is not enough to interpret the world, it must be transformed. [5]

And in fact, over more than 150 years The Communist Manifesto has become the most influential, most translated, reprinted (and demonized) single document of modern history. It’s a work of extraordinary literary power fused with historical analysis; a document of its time yet resonant, as we see here, for later generations. A document which can be, has been, critiqued and argued with — even by its author — but which will be carried into any future that is bearable to contemplate.

Marx, Luxemburg and Guevara were revolutionaries but they were not romantics. Their often poetic eloquence is grounded in their study and critical analysis of human society and political economy from the earliest communistic arrangements of prehistory to the emergence of modern capitalism and imperialist wars. They did not idealize past societies or attempt to create marginal communities of lifestyle purists, but — beginning with Marx — they scrutinized the illusions of past and contemporary reformers and rebels in the light of history, aware how easy it can be for parties and leaders to lose momentum, drift off and settle down with existing relationships of power. (It is this kind of compromise that Luxemburg addresses in Reform or Revolution.)

So what have we here?

The Communist Manifesto was so named because at a certain moment the emerging German League of Communists asked Marx and Engels to draft a platform. Thus, Marx is both setting forth a new theory of history and making a program manifest: asking, what in economic history has produced the need for Communism as a movement and what does Communism in 1848 actually stand for? He describes, with admiration as well as condemnation, the contradictory achievements of industrial capitalism. He notes, sometimes with scorching wit, the “spectral” interpretations of Communism floating abroad, and defines its real goalas common ownership of the means of production.

Fifty years later, in 1899, Luxemburg vigorously analyzes the reformist “opportunism” that would keep the old systemic relations of ownership and production in place under the guise of socialist reform. She dissects this opportunism in the ideas of Eduard Bernstein, an elder leader of the German Marxist Social Democratic Party with the additional cachet of being Engels’ literary executor. Her confrontation is coming from a young person, a foreigner, and a woman in a party rife with “virulent male chauvinism.” [6] Coming from anyone, it would have constituted a brilliant intellectual autopsy.

Luxemburg makes it clear that to be antireformist is not to be antireform:

For Social Democracy there exists an indissoluble tie between social reform and revolution. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its goal. [7]

With her critique of Bernstein’s article as a springboard, she goes on to enunciate ideas that acquire renewed pungency and suggestiveness today:

The fate of the socialist movement is not bound to bourgeois democracy; but the fate of democracy, on the contrary, is bound to the socialist movement. Democracy does not acquire greater chances of life in the measure that the working class renounces the struggle for its emancipation; on the contrary, democracy acquires greater chances of survival as the socialist movement becomes sufficiently strong to struggle against the reactionary consequences of world politics and the bourgeois desertion of democracy. He who would strengthen democracy must also want to strengthen and not weaken the socialist movement; and with the renunciation of the struggle for socialism goes that of both the labor movement and democracy. [8]

Legal reform and revolution are not different methods of historical progress that can be picked out at pleasure from the counter of history, just as one chooses hot or cold sausages. They are different moments in the development of class society which condition and complement each other, and at the same time exclude each other reciprocally…

In effect, every legal constitution is the product of a revolution. In the history of classes, revolution is the act of political creation while legislation is the political expression of the life of a society that has already come into being. Work for legal reforms does not itself contain its own driving force independent from revolution. [9]

In 1965, Che Guevara, as participant-theorist of an actual ongoing revolution, writes to an Uruguayan editor friend a letter obviously intended to make manifest the experience of the emerging Cuban society. By then, Che, an Argentine, had traveled on his continent, studied Marxism in Guatemala, fought along with Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement, [10] served in the new Cuban revolutionary government, and was beginning to work for the extension of socialism in Latin America and among the “nonaligned” nations of Africa and Asia. He is writing of the labor pains of a transitional revolutionary society. How is it to be born? There is the idea, socialism, and there is also “the human being” — incomplete, coming alive in new conditions where labor becomes shared social responsibility, but also initially dwelling as it were between two vastly different worlds: “The new society in formation has to compete fiercely with the past.” [11] Commodity relationships are still imprinted on the mind. This phase of revolutionary process is new and unstable and anxiety may seek relief in autocratic rigidity. The leadership in such a transition has need for a vigilant, well-calibrated self-criticism. Rosa Luxemburg had written: “Revolutions are not ‘made’ and great movements of the people are not produced according to technical recipes that repose in the pockets of the party leaders.” [12] Che envisioned that “[s]ociety as a whole must be converted into a gigantic school” [13]; those who hope to educate must be in constant and responsive touch with those who are learning: teachers must also be learners.

In this connection it’s necessary to think about art and culture. Marx writes of how

the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society... [U]ninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air…[14]

And, in a system of commodity relationships, “the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science” become “paid wage laborers” who must “sell themselves piecemeal” and “are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of exploitation, all the fluctuations of the market.” For the artist, this can also mean censorship by the market.

Che elaborates this theme:

The superstructure [of capitalism] imposes a kind of art in which the artist must be educated. Rebels are subdued by the machine, and only exceptional talents [I read this phrase as in ironic quotes] may create their own work. The rest become shamefaced hirelings or are crushed… Meaningless anguish or vulgar amusement thus become convenient safety valves for human anxiety. The idea of using art as a weapon of protest is combated. [15]

But he also points to the blinders of earlier socialist revolutions-in-process, where “an exaggerated dogmatism” has tried to address the question of culture, demanding “the formally exact representation of nature” in art, followed by “a mechanical representation of the social reality they wanted to show: the ideal society, almost without conflicts or contradictions, that they sought to create.” [16]

Che struggles here with the dialectic of art as simultaneously embodiment and shaper of consciousness, rooted in past forms and materials even as it gestures toward a still unachieved reality. What is to be the freedom of the artist in the new Cuba? It can be difficult, living under present conditions, to conceive of how a freedom expanded to all, to each and every person, might expand, not limit, the freedom of the imaginative artist, and the very possibilities of art. Difficult for those who are already artists — even as, outraged, we are forced to market ourselves piecemeal and struggle for what Marx called “disposable time” [17] — to see the “invisible cage” within which we work. Difficult, too, perhaps, for the navigators of a new society to apprehend the peculiar, but not exceptional, labor of the artist.

In the words of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci:

…to be precise, one should speak of a struggle for a “new culture” and not for a “new art” (in the immediate sense)… [P]erhaps it cannot even be said that the struggle is for a new artistic content apart from form because content cannot be considered abstractly, in separation from form. To fight for a new art would mean to fight to create new individual artists, which is absurd since artists cannot be created artificially. One must speak of a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality and, therefore, a world intimately engrained in “possible artists” and “possible works of art.” [18]

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a self-indulgent or self-deceiving life. Patience, realism and critical imagination are required of both kinds of creativity. Yet all the writers in this book speak emotionally of the human condition and of human realization, not as “losing oneself” within a mass collectivity but as release from the frozen senses, the dumbed-down alienation of mass society: Marx of “the complete emancipation of all the human qualities and senses [from the mere sense of having]… The eye has become a human eye when its object has become a human, social object” [19]; Rosa Luxemburg of “social happiness,” of the mass strike as “creativity,” of “freedom” as no “special privilege” and of the “love of every beautiful day.” And Che of the revolutionary as “moved by great feelings of love” though this may “seem ridiculous” in bourgeois politics; of the need for a “new human being” created through responsible participation in a society belonging to all.

As Aijaz Ahmad has written, “The first resource of hope is memory itself.” [20] Marxism is founded on the historical memory of how existing, apparently immutable, human relationships came to be as they are. In the essays that follow we hear voices from three different generations of people who believed, as recent enormous antiwar and anti-imperialist gatherings on every continent have been asserting, that “another world is possible.” If for some today this still only means trying to regulate and refurbish the runaway engine of capitalism, for an ever-growing number of others it means changing the direction of the journey, toward an utterly different, still-forming reality. Here are urgent conversations from the past that are still being carried on, among new voices, throughout the world.

—Adrienne Rich, March 2004

1. see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in this edition, p53.

2. Ernesto Che Guevara, “Speech to Medical Students and Health Workers,” Che Guevara Reader, (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003), p115.

3. Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003), p70.

4. see The Communist Manifesto, in this edition, p35.

5. “Notes for the Study of the Ideology of the Cuban Revolution,” Che Guevara Reader, p123.

6. Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, 2nd ed., (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p27.

7. see Reform or Revolution, in this edition, p71.

8. see Reform or Revolution, in this edition, p126.

9. see Reform or Revolution, in this edition, p128.

10. The revolutionary movement led by Fidel Castro that overthrew the regime of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba (1959). Its name commemorated Fidel’s July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada army barracks.

11. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p154.

12. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, eds., The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), p328.

13. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p155.

14. see The Communist Manifesto, in this edition, p33.

15. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p161.

16. see Socialism and Man in Cuba, in this edition, p162.

17. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, tr. Martin Nicolaus, (New York: Penguin USA, 1983), p708.

18. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, eds., tr. William Boelhower, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p98.

19. “Private Property and Communism,” The Portable Karl Marx, Eugene Kamenka, ed., (New York: Penguin USA, 1983), p151.

20. “Resources of Hope: A Reflection on Our Times,” in Frontline (India) Vol. 18 #10, May 15–25, 2001.

CAMP JEFF BY TOVA REICH

CHAPTER ONE

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 06

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featuring a foreword by Naomi Klein.

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

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

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

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

November 04

Election 2024 Survival Guide: A Reading List

November 01

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

Too Great A Sky, a new novel from Liliana Corobca and her award-winning translator Monica Cure, tells the story of the deportation of Romanians from Bucovina. The protagonist, Ana, is eleven years old when the Soviet soldiers send her from Bucovina, Romania, to Kazakhstan. She is just one of many forced to leave behind her home and make the three week long journey via train. The trip is a harsh, humiliating one, but in spite of the cold and the closeness of death, life persists in the boxcar in the form of story-telling, riddles, and ritual. Years later, Ana recalls her childhood for her great grand-daughter, who is considering moving her to a nursing home. Her story, told with unflinching candor, is a chronicle of a life lived during a time of great political and national change, a story of an existence defined and curtailed by lines drawn on a map.

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

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
BY MONICA CURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Monica Cure
Bucharest, April 2024

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

October 25

Gary Indiana (1950 - 2024)

Gary Indiana, photographed by Hedi El Kholti

REMEMBERING GARY INDIANA
(1950 - 2024)

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

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

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

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.

Read Adrienne Rich’s preface to MANIFESTO: “Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Che Guevara”

April 11

by Seven Stories Press

PREFACE TO MANIFESTO

“KARL MARX, ROSA LUXEMBURG, AND CHE GUEVARA”

BY ADRIENNE RICH

The revolution is not, as some claim, a standardizer of collective will, of collective initiative. To the contrary, it is a liberator of human beings’ individual capacity.

What the revolution does do, however, is to orient that capacity. [2]

As a young medical student traveling through Latin America, Che Guevara noted this concretely:

It was Marx first of all who described how capital not only dispossesses and forces the vast majority of people “to sell themselves piecemeal,” but contains, ultimately, its own undoing:

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells. [4]

But he first lays forth an exposition of the history of capitalism, the emergence of bourgeois or owning-class power and the effects of that power, a panorama so prescient of 21st century social conditions that it transcends its own moment of writing. As Che was to observe in 1964:

So what have we here?

Luxemburg makes it clear that to be antireformist is not to be antireform:

For Social Democracy there exists an indissoluble tie between social reform and revolution. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its goal. [7]

With her critique of Bernstein’s article as a springboard, she goes on to enunciate ideas that acquire renewed pungency and suggestiveness today:

In this connection it’s necessary to think about art and culture. Marx writes of how

Che elaborates this theme:

In the words of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci:

—Adrienne Rich, March 2004

Recent posts

CAMP JEFF BY TOVA REICH

CHAPTER ONE

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

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
BY MONICA CURE

—Monica Cure
Bucharest, April 2024

Gary Indiana, photographed by Hedi El Kholti

REMEMBERING GARY INDIANA
(1950 - 2024)

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

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

Read Adrienne Rich’s preface to MANIFESTO: “Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Che Guevara”

April 11

by Seven Stories Press

PREFACE TO MANIFESTO

“KARL MARX, ROSA LUXEMBURG, AND CHE GUEVARA”

BY ADRIENNE RICH

The revolution is not, as some claim, a standardizer of collective will, of collective initiative. To the contrary, it is a liberator of human beings’ individual capacity.

What the revolution does do, however, is to orient that capacity. [2]

As a young medical student traveling through Latin America, Che Guevara noted this concretely:

It was Marx first of all who described how capital not only dispossesses and forces the vast majority of people “to sell themselves piecemeal,” but contains, ultimately, its own undoing:

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells. [4]

But he first lays forth an exposition of the history of capitalism, the emergence of bourgeois or owning-class power and the effects of that power, a panorama so prescient of 21st century social conditions that it transcends its own moment of writing. As Che was to observe in 1964:

So what have we here?

Luxemburg makes it clear that to be antireformist is not to be antireform:

For Social Democracy there exists an indissoluble tie between social reform and revolution. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its goal. [7]

With her critique of Bernstein’s article as a springboard, she goes on to enunciate ideas that acquire renewed pungency and suggestiveness today:

In this connection it’s necessary to think about art and culture. Marx writes of how

Che elaborates this theme:

In the words of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci:

—Adrienne Rich, March 2004

Recent posts

CAMP JEFF BY TOVA REICH

CHAPTER ONE

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

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE BY MONICA CURE

—Monica Cure Bucharest, April 2024

Gary Indiana, photographed by Hedi El Kholti

REMEMBERING GARY INDIANA (1950 - 2024)

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

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

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
BY MONICA CURE

—Monica Cure
Bucharest, April 2024

REMEMBERING GARY INDIANA
(1950 - 2024)