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

Out now, Tova Reich’s new novel is a raucous and biting tale of a Catskills reeducation camp for wealthy sex pests, helmed by a wealthy benefactor named Jeffrey Epstein (not that one), who just wants to clear his name.

When Manhattan's preeminent writer manqué, Gershon Gordon, receives a thick envelope containing his acceptance to someplace called Camp Jeffrey Epstein, he’s incredulous. True, his already stagnant career has recently ground to a full stop due to accusations of sexual impropriety, but the disgraced financier is dead, and besides, Gordon hasn’t even applied. Despite his reservations, during a freakish winter heatwave Gordon soon finds himself at a former Borscht Belt hotel in the Catskills, seated among the chosen ten — nine men and one woman — selected as members of the inaugural class of Camp Jeff. He hopes he might at least get a book out of the bizarre program, a luxe experimental therapeutic regimen designed to rehabilitate its campers, all of whom have been laid low by the #MeToo movement.

Written in Reich’s signature satirical mode, Camp Jeff revels in its brazen indictment of contemporary masculinity, elite arrogance, and therapy culture. Her whip-smart dialogue and unsparing pen reveal rather than merely mock: here is a deeply considered work of psychological portraiture and a profound examination of contemporary American culture.

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.

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. 

"Political power," says Howard Zinn, "is controlled by the corporate elite, and the arts are the locale for a kind of guerilla warfare in the sense that guerillas look for apertures and opportunities where they can have an effect."

In Artists in Times of War, Zinn looks at the possibilities to create such apertures through art, film, activism, publishing, and through our everyday lives. In this collection of four essays—three of which are previously unpublished—the author of A People's History of the United States writes about why "to criticize the government is the highest act of patriotism."

 This classic manual on repression by revolutionary activist Victor Serge offers fascinating anecdotes about the tactics of police provocateurs and an analysis of the documents of the Tsarist secret police in the aftermath of the Russian revolution.

As we approach the 100th anniversary of Victor Serge’s (1926) classic exposé of political repression, the specter of fear as a tool of political repression is chillingly familiar to us in world increasingly threatened by totalitarianism. Serge’s exposé of the surveillance methods used by the Czarist police reads like a spy thriller. An irrepressible rebel, Serge wrote this manual for political activists, describing the structures of state repression and how to dodge them—including how to avoid being followed, what to do if arrested, and tips on securing correspondence. He also explains how such repression is ultimately ineffective.

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

In early 2004, photographs came to light revealing extensive prisoner abuses, instances of torture, and other war crimes at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib detention center, committed by U.S. military and other government personnel. At the time, the Human Rights Watch confirmed that “the only exceptional aspect of the abuse at Abu Ghraib may have been that it was photographed." It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America's most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison.

In Abolition Democracy, Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI's "most wanted list." She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners.

Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing Bush-era disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Born in San Salvador in 1935, Roque Dalton dedicated his life to armed struggle while writing fierce, tender poems about his country and its people. In Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases / Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle, Dalton offers a road map for a liberated El Salvador, writing through the lens of five poetic personas, each with their own imagined history and distinct voice. This collection shows a country caught in the crosshairs of American imperialism, where the few rule the many and the many fight to survive—and yet there is love and humor and self-mockery to be found here on every page, in every verse, as well as an abiding faith in humanity. “I believe the world is beautiful,” Dalton writes, “and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” 

 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. 

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.

READ A REMEMBRANCE ON ‘FRIEZE’
READ A TRIBUTE IN ‘THE GUARDIAN’READ A REMEMBRANCE IN ‘THE PARIS REVIEW’

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.

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.

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.

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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. 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Dan Simon

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