Seven Stories Selects Book Club

When we share our motto, “works of the radical imagination,” we’re talking about all the revolutionary ways books change the world by shaping the identities of the people who write and read them. Our books might be works of politics, or literature, for kids or adults. It’s an eclectic mix with a philosophical underpinning and a stubborn belief that there are such things as great books, and it’s always our aim to ring that bell. When you believe that works of literature and works of politics are both works of the radical imagination, everything changes.

We’re launching the Seven Stories Selects Book Club to introduce our readers to the totality—the complete circle—of our publishing vision, to share works by our authors in such a way that you can experience the fullness of these books in the context out of which they grew.

It is important for us that we share with you the books that we publish alongside one another, and encourage you to read more deeply into our catalogue, because it’s all relational, and it adds up to a testament to the human spirit and the radical imagination. You cannot do that, at least in the same way, in any bookstore or library. Even on the Seven Stories website, you’d have to spend hours scrolling through the alphabetical listings, A – Z. Whether through our eBook subscription, our print book subscriptions, or our children’s books subscription programs, these book clubs are a unique way for us to share our work with you.

Our first criterion is to select from among our new releases the ones we think will be most exciting to the widest range of readers, regardless of their sticker price—our big new political and literary titles, our top backlist titles that you may not already know about, and kids’ books organized by age level and theme. Then we try to make it as user-friendly as possible, lowering the pricing on these titles and averaging it so you pay the same every month, with free shipping for orders over $25, and a special discount on our entire backlist so Book Club members can be encouraged to roam among the more than 1,000-title catalogue.

A subscription to the Seven Stories Selects Book Club is a great way to support independent publishing. Maybe your life has already been changed by a Seven Stories book. You might have been assigned A Young People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn in middle school, or maybe someone gave you A is for Activist as a baby shower present when you and your newborn were about to start parenting each other. Or you’re a writer and Octavia Butler’s or Annie Ernaux’s or Kurt Vonnegut’s or Nelson Algren’s books are why you’re a writer.

To have the experience of reading in context, of being part of a radical vision that will introduce you to works of the radical imagination from every corner of the globe, from revolutionaries that made revolutions and other revolutionaries who quietly pursue a body of work in which human struggles unfold in nonhierarchical fashion, you’ll really get to know us through a subscription to the Seven Stories Selects Book Club.