2025 Staff Picks

Behold, our Holiday Gift Guide for all of your Holiday Gifting needs.

Explore this year's holiday gift guide with everything you need for those hard-to-please loved ones... and it's all 30% off (40% off for newsletter subscribers. Not a subscriber yet? Sign up here)!

The perfect excuse to grab yourself a little present too :)

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GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ADULTS

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HYPER-SPECIFIC GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EVERYONE ON YOUR LIST

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GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR KIDS

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GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR TEENS 

Here at Seven Stories, we’re proud to publish radical world literature for people of all ages, including books for kids and young adults with our imprint Triangle Square Books for Young Readers.

Last year, we introduced Triangle Square Book Clubs, monthly kids’ book subscriptions for book lovers large and small. Compiled into thematic collections and organized by age range, the books included in these subscriptions present stories from all over the globe that share the power of community, promote a radical kindness towards others, and emphasize the importance of standing up for what’s right.

For readers of Seven Stories Press books — and parents and children of all ages — a subscription to one of our Triangle Square book club is the perfect gift for the holiday season. And this year we’re offering something special: a free Triangle Square Books for Young Readers tote with every subscription. Spacious and sturdy and extremely cool,** the TSBYR tote is adorned with beautiful woodcut artwork by J. Borges from José Saramago’s picture book The Lizard, translated by Nick Caistor and Lucia Caistor (Note: The Lizard is included in the Global Kid Lit Book Club).

Grab a subscription for your precocious niece, or your friend’s new baby, or your favorite neighbor’s kid (or your Republican cousin’s middle schooler ;-) ). And you'll get a free tote! There’s no better present than new books!

(**It’s such a cool tote that even Lorde has one!)

Please note, all totes will ship out in early January 2026!

Books for future changemakers

For readers ages 4-8

Six picture books that emphasize the power of community and promote a radical kindness towards others: Abolition is Love, 10,000 Dresses, Together, Grandpa Stops a War, The Wedding Portrait, and Oh! The Things We’re For.

Picture books from around the world

For readers ages 4-8 

Six picture books from all over the globe, from countries such as Indonesia, Portugal, Iran, Brazil, and Palestine: The Lizard, The Duel, The Donkey’s Gone!, The Story of Hurry, My Night in the Planetarium, and The Best Tailor in Pinbaue.

Books for a better tomorrow

For readers ages 8-12

Six picture books and chapter books that encourage kids to be true to themselves and stand up for what’s right: Sing It!, Stories for Kids Who Want to Save the World, M is for Movement, Trevor, Human Rights, and Atty at Law.

Kids’ books from around the world

For readers ages 8-12

Seven picture books and chapter books from all over the globe, including Portugal, Iceland, Chile, Denmark, and more: An Unexpected Light, Adam and Thomas, The Silence of Water, The Story of the Blue Planet, A Rabbits Rebellion, Zenobia, and Julia and the Triple C.

Thought-provoking books for tweens and teens

For readers ages 10+

The stuff you won’t learn in school — stories of activists, workers, and other changemakers fighting for a better world: A Young People’s History of the United States, A Different Mirror for Young People, Freedom Summer for Young People, 1493 for Young People, Jane Jacobs, Escape ‘56, and Breaking the Chains.

ABOUT TRIANGLE SQUARE BOOK CLUBS

Triangle Square Book Clubs are monthly kids’ book subscriptions focused on highlighting social justice kids' books and kids' books from around the world. 

Triangle Square Book Club subscribers receive one (1) book per month over the course of the subscription period, which is typically six or seven months, depending which of the book clubs are selected by the subscriber. The payment method is only charged one time, and the subscription never auto-renews.

To give a Triangle Square Book Club subscription as a gift, simply input the recipient's mailing address on the shipping page during checkout. If you have any questions, send us an email and we'd be happy to help. 

Sometimes good things happen, but not without the hard work of people fighting for a better world. To celebrate this hard-won victory, and all the people who've worked so diligently to make it happen, here are some stories of hope and resistance that feel right for the current moment, all 30% off.

To celebrate the release of Eye of the Monkey by Krisztina Tóth, translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, we're excited to share an excerpt from the novel, praised by 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature winner László Krasznahorkai: “Krisztina Tóth is irredeemably a poet. This is revealed by every element of her latest novel. … [She] is a magnificent artist; receive her as such.”

In this selection, taken from the very start of the book, one of the book's protagonists, Giselle, a professor at a local university, notices that a man is following her on her commute home from work.

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ROAD SOAKED WITH RAIN

I rushed to a different metro car, but the man following me saw where I was going. He was right behind me. He lowered himself into the seat opposite, staring at me fixedly. I tried to avoid his gaze, not to encourage him with eye contact. I know that at times like this, the worst thing is to look directly at someone: The returned gaze will only egg him on. The one following will find evidence to support their delusions, a mirror of their own disturbed feelings. I was used to seeing strange characters roaming around the city. Loud and foulmouthed, looking for trouble. You had to avoid their gaze. I’d already been recognized a few times. The university where I work uses instructors’ photographs to recruit new students: This was annoying to some of its employees. I knew all too well about the troubled kids in the closed districts. There was nothing I could do about that. But this boy wasn’t from one of the segregation zones, of that I was sure.

I didn’t look up but only kept staring off to the side, into the air, toward the end of the metro car. Even so, I noticed a few details of his physical appearance: for example, his nails, bitten right down to the ends. His hands weren’t ugly, but the tortured nails, chewed until bloody, looked alarming. The crack-brained gaze of his large brown eyes was frightening, the dark rings under his eyes. The matted hair falling onto his forehead. It crossed my mind that perhaps he really was insane, perhaps I should press the alarm to summon a security guard, or at least jump up and run to the other end of the car where there were a few more people. Sitting near me there was only a middle-aged woman, I noticed as I looked around, with a pink handbag too bright for her age, and an adolescent boy with earplugs, lost in his own world.

I sensed from the guy’s alert body posture that there was no point in my changing seats—he would be right behind me, making this impossible chase even more unambiguous and terrifying. If he got closer, I’d panic, I’d tear into him, demanding an explanation. Absurd. Instead, I stared at the hanging straps, the ads on the metro car walls. As of late, the trains no longer stopped in the more dangerous districts where the poor lived. The metro entrances, in those areas, had all been closed. The main TV station broadcast disquieting images every single night of the homeless as they pried open the bars or tore them out using ropes. Some people even managed to drag away the steel frames with cars, forcing their way into the metro stations, howling bestially. When the cold weather came last year, the police—who ended up retreating—couldn’t clear the thronging crowds from the stations as they lit fires in oil drums and put down their pieces of cardboard on the chipped marble slabs. At the former Palace of Culture stop, they pelted the passing trains. The station had to be cleared out with tear gas, counterterrorism units. Many unfortunate and drugged outcasts wandered around the city, talking and shouting to themselves, but the boy sitting across from me didn’t look like he was using, and no matter how convenient an explanation it would be, he didn’t seem crazy. So what did he want?

He’d been following me around for days already, turning up here and there in my neighborhood. It only became clear that this was no mere coincidence, but that he really was stalking me, or at the very least following me, when I got onto the metro that day.

I’d seen him for the first time a few weeks ago, as still as a statue in front of the university. Thrice weekly I teach in this hideous cement colossus. Built two years ago, it’s called the New University. Four glass elevators travel up and down the facade, completely obscuring the streets behind it. He was standing in front of the entrance, an enormous automatic door surrounded by columns. Just another student, I thought. I was still thinking that when I hurried by him for the second or third time, his gaze fixed greedily on my face. Exam time was approaching, and I thought he was a student who hadn’t shown up to class, finally realizing the extent of his absences. He wanted some test sheets, or who knew—exoneration, advice, a favor.

As I was leaving the building’s echoing entrance hall and glimpsed him standing by the automatic door, I got a bad feeling. Then he disappeared for a few days, and I relaxed. I went back to my usual daily routes, almost forgetting about him. Maybe two weeks went by; then he appeared again by the metro exit. I recognized him immediately. He was in front of the newsprint kiosk, where my husband usually bought his newspapers.

Only two newspapers were on sale now, but all the same, during the week my husband bought them, leaving them on his writing desk, placing the extra coins in a small dish of green glass as he’d always done. Even on Saturday mornings, he still came out here and paid for the newspapers: He read out the headlines to me in inchoate rage, then crammed the papers into the garbage can. I asked him at least not to crumple them up because I could use them when cleaning vegetables. Or not to buy them. But he was incapable of renouncing his rituals. So much had changed in our lives, and it was these rituals that kept him from falling apart. His habits, routes, movements were a handhold; without them, he might lose his sense of orientation completely. We had lived in this neighborhood for decades, and although so many things had recently closed or been torn down, whenever I stepped out from the metro underpass, I still had a feeling of coming home.

But now, here was this boy. Exactly here, on this small square. To reassure myself, I kept repeating like a mantra that maybe he too lived here and was headed home. That explained why he recognized me. I had many colleagues in this neighborhood, I tried to convince myself. Why couldn’t he be living here somewhere close by as well?

Of late, it had grown increasingly difficult for me to register the faces of my students. I teach them for only one year and hardly have any personal interactions with them. I especially tend to mix up the trendy ones, they all look so much alike. With their cropped hair, tight-fitting pants, sometimes with the same eyeglasses as well. The girls are even more uniform, their haircuts and clothes identical.

But this guy was somehow different. I was struck by that from the very beginning. His hair was dark, somewhat unkempt, his skin was dark too—tanned. His gaze was penetrating, almost exalted.

Right after I stepped out of the metro car, he did as well. He was hurrying after me. I knew now for certain that I was being followed, and as I quickened my steps, my hastened tempo must have looked like an attempt at escape. At the bottom of the metro staircase, I came to a stop, abruptly changed direction, and got in line in front of a pizza stand. I stealthily glanced to the side to check if he had gone on. I didn’t even want to look at him, and yet an invisible, wide-open eye in the back of my neck told me that yes, he was still there. I would have liked to turn around and ask him directly what the hell he wanted, but the anxiety swelling in my chest proved stronger than my curiosity. I knew why: The deep, tormented wrinkle cutting across the boy’s forehead did not bode well. A few tiny signs, his fragmented movements, or the strange impeded facial tics surely betrayed latent madness. And that oblique, agonized crease sent a message to me that this guy did not have things under control mentally, and that I could be in real danger.

I ordered a pizza slice with arugula. I fumbled to find the small change in my wallet as the girl with a tongue piercing behind the counter looked impatiently at the people waiting behind me. The pizza was cold and tasteless, almost inedible. I chewed, feigning indifference, staring at the passersby, sometimes sneaking a look to the side to see if the boy was still there. We both knew that I saw him, and in my nervousness, I began to panic. Dropping the paper napkin, I clumsily bent down for it.

The sound of a thunderclap mixed with the echoing roar of the departing and arriving trains.

People walking down the steps into the metro shook out their sodden umbrellas; those without umbrellas wiped the rainwater from their foreheads with the sides of their hands. There must have been a downpour. The entire afternoon the air had been thick, as if portending a storm, but as I began my commute home no cloudburst seemed imminent, as if it were going to bypass the city.

I finished the pizza, folding the thick, inedible crusts into the paper plate and tossing them into a bin. I had to hurry: my pursuer might make up his mind to approach me. He was still there, I sensed it, I even glimpsed his back. This storm had come right in time for him, for he was standing outside, at the top of the stairs, beneath the metro entrance’s concrete eaves, squeezed in among other passengers, as if he too were only waiting for the rain to stop. I realized I could turn around, get back on the metro, and easily shake him off. And immediately, I was enraged with myself. What an absurd situation, I thought. I’ve been on my feet since early morning with two thick folders of tests in my bag to be marked up, my shoulders aching with tiredness, and now my own idiotic anxieties were stopping me from getting home. Well, no. I walked around the people waiting beneath the eaves and stepped into the downpour.

The rain was falling obliquely in torrents, the stallholders on the crowded square were hurriedly pulling tarpaulins over their stands. I picked up my pace, but within seconds my clothes were soaked through, my skirt clinging to my hips, my shoes filled with water, the rain dripping down my forehead. Blinking, I waited for the light to turn green. The cars had all turned on their headlights; behind the windshield wipers of one, I saw a man’s blurred face. Leaning forward, I ran, heard the thunder—I was trying to get to the medical clinic on the other side of the street where I could take shelter on the steps. My bag was also soaking; my laptop was in there, and I was worried about everything getting wet.

As I dashed across the sidewalk, I felt someone approaching, then felt someone grab my arm, as if they wanted to keep me there, in the middle of the street, bubbles welling up on the road from the pounding rain.

I knew immediately that it was him—the guy from the metro. He stood there on the crosswalk before me in the pouring rain, in his shirt, yelling at me to stop. The light changed, the cars began moving, somebody honked at us.

My strength gave out, I turned around to face him; trying to outshout the rumbling of the rain, I asked him what he wanted. He looked at me with this penetrating gaze, both of us drenched through and through, and answered:

I have to speak to you. You are my mother.

Earlier this month, I got to meet with three members of Denver Public Library’s collection development team. We talked about issues facing their library today, and I shared some of our exciting upcoming titles and backlist highlights. I even got to give Lily one of my last tote bags for our Triangle Square imprint, featuring art from José Saramago’s The Lizard.

Here are some of the books they are excited to read!

Lily Kosmicki, Young Adult, Media, and Graphic Collection Development Librarian, Denver Public Library

I am most looking forward to Dan Wakefield’s biography of Kurt Vonnegut for young readers, Kurt Vonnegut: The Making of a Writer, since he made a huge impression on me as a young adult. I think teens will be interested in learning more about him, and I am always adding new titles from Seven Stories  to my to-read list. 

Tamar Miller, Library Supervisor, Collection Development, Denver Public Library

I picked Orlanda by Jacqueline Harpman because Lily recommended it and I always take my brilliant colleagues’ recommendations to heart!

Lainie Miller, Adult Print Selection Team, Denver Public Library

I do collection development for literary, historical, and women’s fiction and nonfiction in the areas of philosophy and psychology, language, arts and recreation, literature, and history. I'm embarrassingly late to the party but looking forward to seeing what all the Annie Ernaux and Jacqueline Harpman fuss has been about!

Does your collection development team at your library want to get some early copies of our books and meet with me to hear about some highlights? Send me an email—claire AT sevenstories.com.

Seven Stories Press Acquires Ned Blackhawk's National Book Award-winning history of Native America, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, for adaptation in 'For Young People' Series. 

October 6, 2025, New York, NY. Seven Stories publisher Dan Simon and Triangle Square Books for Young Readers publisher Ruth Weiner have acquired the adaptation rights to Ned Blackhawk’s award-winning and critically acclaimed history of Native America, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, for their middle grade and YA ‘For Young People’ series. The book, slated for a Fall 2026 publication, will be adapted for younger readers by series adapter, Rebecca Stefoff, and called The Rediscovery of America for Young People.

Winner of the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction, The Rediscovery of America, published by Yale University Press, was praised by the judges: “Drawing on prodigious scholarship conducted over decades, Ned Blackhawk centers Indigenous people across a sweep of 500 years of United States history, reimagining and retelling familiar historical episodes from a new point of departure. In the process, Blackhawk ‘rediscovers’ America, guiding his readers to a novel understanding of our nation’s past and, hopefully, our collective future. This is an enlightening, transformative, and enduring work.”

The book was also a Finalist for the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Award in History; Winner of 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction; Winner of the 2024 Mark Lynton History Prize; and was named a Best or Notable book of 2023 by the New Yorker, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, New York Times, and Washington Post.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Kathleen DuVal called the book “Eloquent and comprehensive.... In the book’s sweeping synthesis, standard flashpoints of U.S. history take on new meaning.”

“I am extraordinarily humbled by the continued reach and recognition of my recent book,” says Professor Blackhawk. “It was intended to fill a pressing need in the field and offer specialists and history teachers alike resources to combat the enduring erasure of Native peoples from U.S. history. I’m particularly pleased by the maps that frame the book’s beginning and end as well as by the extraordinary number of messages and letters that keep coming in response to the book.”

Ruth Weiner added, “Blackhawk’s brilliant history will provide an opportunity for schools to teach and kids to learn a truer and fuller Native American history. Making this scholarship accessible to younger readers is more important now than ever when there are efforts to eradicate the teaching of an all but white history of America.”

The ‘For Young People’ series includes critically acclaimed and bestselling adaptations of award-winning books by Ronald Takaki, Jared Diamond, Charles C. Mann, and Howard Zinn among others. Zinn’s radical US history, A Young People’s History of the United States, which was recently updated and revised by cultural critic Ed Morales, and Takaki’s multicultural history, A Different Mirror for Young People, which will be published in 2026 in a new edition revised and updated by historian A. Naomi Paik, have been widely adopted into school curricula around the country. Teaching materials for all “For Young People” series titles are available as free downloads from the Seven Stories Press website.

To receive further information about or a review copy when it’s available of The Rediscovery of America for
Young People by Ned Blackhawk, adapted by Rebecca Stefoff, please add your contact information to this Google Form.

If you require an immediate response, please contact Ruth Weiner, ruth@sevenstories.com.

www.sevenstories.com
@7StoriesPress
@sevenstories

THE REDISCOVERY OF AMERICA FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
By Ned Blackhawk; Adapted by Rebecca Stefoff
HC: 9781644215708, 576 pages, $50
TR: 9781644215647, 576 pages, $24.95
September 8, 2026

We are absolutely thrilled to share the news that Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated by Natasha Lehrer, was chosen as a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Translated Literature! 

Neige Sinno has created a powerful literary form with Sad Tiger, a book that took France by storm and has become 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.

PRAISE FOR SAD TIGER

"I need everyone to stop what they're doing and read this book; I started it last night and finished it this morning, breaking only to sleep." —Catherine Lacey

"[A] richly literary and starkly shattering account of childhood sexual abuse. . . [T]he author of ‘Sad Tiger’ is aiming for her own quiet revolution.” —Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker

“‘You have looked evil in the eye,’ Sinno writes in “Sad Tiger,” her achingly vivid, cerebral memoir of her abuse and its long aftermath, ‘and now no one can look at you.’ First published in France in 2023, where it won multiple awards including the Le Monde Literary Prize, the Prix Femina and the Goncourt des Lycéens, “Sad Tiger” eschews the 10-foot pole for the scalpel, approaching the subjects of pedophilia and incest with the determined curiosity of a forensic pathologist. Sinno dissects not only her own memories and their impact on the ensuing decades of her life but also the perspective of her abuser. . . . Close-reading her own shards of memory alongside these texts, Sinno contends with both the power and the inevitable impotence of writing, particularly about abuse.” —Lauren Christensen, The New York Times Book Review

“The U.S. debut from French writer Sinno blends autobiography and literary criticism for a staggering portrait of her rapist. . . . Sinno’s prose is equal parts raw and lucid, and it’s enriched by fascinating readings of the sexual abuse depicted in Lolita and other works of literature.This is brilliant.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A work of immolation and rebirth, of winking and wincing, Neige Sinno's mesmerizing interdisciplinary memoir, in Natasha Lehrer's excellent translation, illuminates the darkness and it burns the house down.” —Chad Felix, Center for the Art of Translation

“When it came out in France, Neige Sinno’s heart-stopping Sad Tiger, which pieces together in fragments the lifelong impact of the sexual abuse of a girl in the French Alps by her mountain guide stepfather, blew the literary world apart. Its experimental form of creative nonfiction – a memoir that ditches linear narrative, yet races along like a thriller – was hailed as groundbreaking, the book an instant classic.” —Angelique Chrisafis, The Guardian

“[An] extraordinary personal and literary examination of child sexual abuse and its aftermath. . . . What makes Sinno’s deeply personal book exceptional is that so many impersonal questions crop up again and again, ones that cannot be answered but all the same must be asked.” —Elias Altman, Bookforum

“In spite of her reservations about making art out of trauma, Sinno braids together personal narrative with cultural and literary criticism, analyzing the portrayal of victims and perpetrators across books and film. She toys with the nuances of genre and various storytelling forms, invoking fairy tales, poetry, and legal documents. . . . Sinno has compiled a precise and sweeping depiction of the harm wrought by childhood sexual abuse. . . . Sinno refuses to impose an artificial happy ending and invites the reader into the ambiguity of living with trauma. Sad Tiger extends to its reader the opportunity to witness, and to wrestle.” —McKenzie Watson-Fore, Full Stop

We are thrilled to share the news that activist, political prisoner, and Seven Stories Press author Alaa Abd El-Fattah has been freed after over half-a-decade of imprisonment by the Egyptian government.

British-Egyptian writer Alaa Abd el-Fattah, author of You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, was released last night from Wadi El-Natrun prison in Egypt and has since been reunited with his mother and one of his sisters in Cairo. 

Imprisoned since September 2019, Alaa was charged with ‘spreading fake news’ after sharing a Facebook post about torture in Egypt. He was scheduled to be released from prison on September 29, 2024, but was subject to continued illegal imprisonment for almost a full year after his five-year prison sentence was due to end. The reason for this continued imprisonment has not been clarified by the Egyptian government.

Upon release, Alaa was reunited his mother Laila Soueif, who ended her 287-day hunger strike for her son’s freedom earlier this summer. He has been pardoned by Egyptian President Sisi but it is unclear whether he is able to travel outside of Egypt to reunite with his child in the UK.

“I can’t even describe what I feel,” said Laila Soueif from her house in Giza as she stood next to her son, surrounded by family and friends. “We’re happy, of course. But our greatest joy will come when there are no [political] prisoners in Egypt.”

Arrested and imprisoned repeatedly since 2006, most recently in 2019, Alaa has spent much of his adult life in prison without cause. 

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 voice came to symbolize much of what was fresh, inspiring and revolutionary about the uprisings that have defined the last decade.

His book,You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, a selection of his speeches, interviews, social media posts, and essays since the outbreak of revolution in January 2011, many written from inside prison, was published in 2022, with a foreword by Naomi Klein. These texts of 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.

The campaign to free Alaa has garnered significant, widespread support internationally. Writers, artists, journalists, politicians, ambassadors, celebrities, and trade unions have repeatedly called for Alaa’s release from prison. The majority of living Nobel Literature laureates have twice petitioned political leaders on his behalf. The editorial boards of the world's leading English-language newspapers have called for his release. Thousands upon thousands of people have signed petitions, written letters, and put their bodies on the line at protests — all of these actions have together combined to help free Alaa. It was a worldwide communal effort, and now, finally, he is free.

We're very sad to share the news that Seven Stories author, former basketball player, and minor-league coach, Charley Rosen, has passed away at age 84. Below, our editorial director, Dan Simon, shares a few words about his literary collaborator, colleague, and friend. 

To celebrate Rosen's life and legacy, we're offering free downloads of two of his books through the end of the weekend: The House of Moses All-Stars and The Wizard of Odds.

Ps. The New York Times has published a particularly touching — and thorough — obituary to Rosen. We'd love you to read that too. You can do so here (gift link).

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A Note From Dan Simon

Difficult to write about Charley Rosen, who died last Saturday at the age of 84. It’s the rare author who brings a larger human story to the daily drama of professional—or college—sports. Charley Rosen did that time and time again. He knew the game in and out, having played for Hunter College and then coached in the CBA and for college teams. He knew everyone in the world of basketball and everyone in basketball knew him. He loved the game and the people who kept it alive.

Charley was always writing, literally nothing could stop him. Up until six weeks ago he was writing away on his next book. And he believed in every book he wrote. The best of them — The House of Moses All-Stars, The Wizard of Odds, to name just two of the more than 30 books he wrote — are teeming with life. And no one could describe game action the way Charley could. The only thing comparable that I know of is Nelson Algren describing the pummeling that goes on in the ring.

A great writer will try each time to outdo themselves in every book, and succeeds in accomplishing the impossible at least some of the time. That was Charley.

His latest book, a coming-of-age basketball novel called Dribbling a Basketball to Damascus, drawn heavily from his own life, will be released on October 28th. And The Fight Game in Black and White, by legendary NBA player and coach Ray Scott, with Charley as his wingman, comes out next summer.

Last spring I asked him if he was watching the playoffs. “No way,” he said, “why would I? Show me a team that plays the game right. They just hoist 3s. Most teams don’t play defense anymore.” One of the true patriots of Hoops Nation, who wasn’t afraid to criticize the country he loved most, RIP Charley Rosen.

—Dan Simon

Seven Stories Press exhibited at the New England Independent Booksellers Association (NEIBA) with the Independent Publishers Caucus (IPC) display in New Hampshire on September 10. To see all of our forthcoming titles, visit our Edelweiss page here. 

Dan Simon founder and publisher of Seven Stories Press worked at our booth in the exhibit hall, and he also signed copies of his upcoming debut novel, Ashland (Europa Editions) at the author reception. Here he is pictured with Katie Lowe, Islandport Press, Yarmouth, Maine (photo courtesy of Shelf Awareness).

A final close up of our books!