Seven Stories Press 140 Watts Street New York, NY 10013 www.sevenstories.com
Seven Stories P ress Fall 2012
Seven Stories Press fall 2012 www.sevenstories.com complete backlist 25% discount on all web orders special offers for k–12 teachers and professors (www.sevenstories.com/textbook) tour and event information For a free complete backlist catalog, e-mail info@sevenstories.com or fax 212-226-1411.
recent awards
and honors
The Graphic Canon by Russ Kick publishers weekly top 10 graphic books of the season “the graphic literary publishing event of the year!”
Racing While Black by Leonard T. Miller and Andrew Simon “book to read for 2010” by autoweek magazine
Ina May Gaskin right livelihood award laureate, 2011 Birth Matters by Ina May Gaskin international planned parenthood federation top 6 books of 2011 God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike by Stanley Moss “song of no god” awarded the pushcart prize Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? by Johan Harstad translated by Deborah Dawkin kirkus reviews best of fiction, 2011; electric literature’s the most beautiful books of the year, 2011 Tea of Ulaanbaatar by Christopher R. Howard chicago center for literature and photography’s best small press wonder, 2011 Wojciech Jagielski special achievement, grand press award (poland), 2011 A History of Marriage by Elizabeth Abbott shortlist, canada’s governor general’s literary awards, 2010 Love Like Hate by Linh Dinh winner, balcones fiction prize 2010 Once You Go Back by Douglas Martin finalist, lambda literary award, 2010
Hello, Cruel World by Kate Bornstein finalist for lgbt nonfiction lambda literary award, 2009; honor book for the stonewall children’s and young adult literature, 2009 Live Through This edited by Sabrina Chap finalist for lgbt anthologies lambda literary award, 2009 10,000 Dresses by Marcus Ewert and Rex Ray american library association, rainbow list 2009; honor book for the stonewall children’s and young adult literature, 2009 The Possession by Annie Ernaux translated by Anna Moschovakis more magazine top ten of 2008 A Field Guide for Female Interrogators by Coco Fusco shortlist, index on censorship t. r. fyvel award, 2008 Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov translated by Marian Schwartz slate best books of 2008 Derrick Jensen one of utne reader’s 50 visionaries who are changing your world; press action’s dynamic dozen, 2008; eric hoffer award, 2008 (for thought to exist in the wild [no voice unheard]); press action person of the year, 2006
contents announcing Triangle Square Editions for kids
6 Trevor A Novella
text and illustrations by james lecesne
8 A Different Mirror for Young People A History of Multicultural America
ronald takaki, adapted by rebecca stefoff
10 The Story of the Blue Planet
andri snær magnason illustrations by áslaug jónsdóttir translated by julian meldon d’arcy
12 Do You Dream in Color?
Insights from a Girl without Sight
laurie rubin
Seven Stories Books for adults
14 billionaires & ballot bandits Election Games 2012
greg palast introduction by robert f. kennedy, jr comics by ted rall
16 Live Through This, 2nd edition On Creativity and Self-Destruction
sabrina chap
18 Ma, He Sold Me For a Few Cigarettes A Memoir of Dublin in the 1950s
martha long
20 The Rich Don’t Always Win
The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class
sam pizzigati
22 Meme Wars
The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics
kalle lasn with adbusters
24 Bobby’s Book
emily davidson as told by robert powers photographs by bruce davidson
4 / seven stories press
26 The Graphic Canon, Volume 2
From “Kubla Khan” to the Brontë Sisters to The Picture of Dorian Gray
edited by russ kick
28 Censored 2013
The Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis of 2011–2012
edited by mickey huff with project censored cartoons by khalil bendib
30 The Beginning of the American Fall
A Comics Journalist Inside the Occupy Wall Street Movement
stephanie mcmillan
32 LoveStar
andri snær magnason translated by victoria cribb
34 Unstuck in Time
A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels
gregory d. sumner
36 The Graphic Canon, Volume 3 and boxed set From Heart of Darkness to Hemingway to Infinite Jest
edited by russ kick
40 Maonomics
Why Chinese Communists Make Better Capitalists than We Do
loretta napoleoni translated by stephen twilley
42 Prince of the World Stories
christopher howard Recently Released
44 God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse by Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gunjevi´c
45 The Book of Obama: From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt by Ted Rall
46 The Graphic Canon, Volume 1: From The Epic of
Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Dangerous Liaisons edited by Russ Kick 48 Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point edited by Subhankar Banerjee 49 Imagining Paradise: New and Selected Poems by Barry Gifford
50 Contact and Distribution Information
fall 2012 / 5
announcing
triangle square editions Books for kids—telling personal stories of courage and commitment
“Trevor’s creator—the visionary James Lecesne—brings his indelible character into the 21st century with a book that reverberates with charm and wisdom and unexpected humor.” —Armistead Maupin “A beautiful, moving, funny, original book is rare at any time. Trevor is not only a remarkable book, it’s an important book.” —Michael Cunningham
a triangle square edition A u g u s t 7, 2 0 1 2
• A portion of the proceeds from Trevor will benefit The Trevor Project
J u v e n i l e F i c t i o n , Ag e s 1 1 –15
• Author tour to New York and San Francisco
5 . 5 x 8 . 2 5 • 9 6 pa g e s
• Coordinated promotions with The Trevor Project and the It Gets
hardcover $ 1 4 . 9 5 US / $ 1 4 . 9 5 C a n IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 2 0 - 6 e b o o k IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 2 1 - 3
T re vor A Novella
James Lecesne
A
compelling young adult novella of love, loss, and Lady Gaga, for anyone who has ever been shunned for being different. Trevor is an exuberant, sociable, and witty thirteen year old. So how come, when he takes that nerve-wracking turn toward his locker at school, does he feel scared and alone? Shunned by his friends, misunderstood by his parents, and harassed at school for being different, Trevor goes from wondering what color glitter to choose for his Lady Gaga costume at Halloween, to wondering why some feelings “are so intense it makes you just want to lay down and die rather than go on feeling it.” Trevor mixes humor and realism in an urgent look at what critical ties can step in at the most unlikely moment, to save you from despair, and give you a reason to go on living.
6 / seven stories press
Better campaign • Promotion through libraries and schools through ALA and other outlets • Excerpt available at issuu.com/sevenstories/docs/trevor • ARCs available at BEA
James Lecesne wrote the Academy Award–winning short film Trevor, which inspired the founding of The Trevor Project. He produced the documentary film After the Storm, which chronicles the struggles of a group of teens in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and he founded the After The Storm Foundation. He has published two young adult novels, Absolute Brightness and Virgin Territory. An actor as well as a writer, James has also appeared on TV, in film, and in the theater. His solo show Word of Mouth was awarded both a NY Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award, and his play, The Road Home: Stories of the Children of War, was presented at the International Peace Conference at The Hague. fall 2012 / 7
a triangle square edition
“Professor Ronald Takaki examines the challenges we face in reconciling our differences and forming a secure, sustainable future for our country. Now more than ever, it’s essential that we understand and embrace our diversity if we are to grow together as a nation.” —President Bill Clinton
A u g u s t 7, 2 0 1 2 Juvenile Fiction / history, ages 11–15 5 . 5 x 8 • 3 6 8 pa g e s pa p e r b a c k $ 1 8 . 9 5 US / $ 1 8 . 9 5 C a n IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 1 6 - 9
“Takaki’s book . . . is a laudable effort—humane, well informed, accessible, and often incisive. It is clearly not intended to divide Americans but rather to teach them to value the nation’s inescapable diversity.” —New York Times Book Review
e b o o k IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 1 7 - 6
A Di fferen t M I r ro r fo r young p eop le
“A Different Mirror advances a truly humane sense of American possibility.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr.
A History of Multicultural America
ronald takaki adap ted by rebecca stefoff
A
long time professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, Ronald Takaki was recognized as one of the foremost scholars of American ethnic history and diversity. When the first edition of A Different Mirror first appeared, Publishers Weekly called it “a brilliant revisionist history of America that is likely to become a classic of multicultural studies” and named it one of the ten best books of the year. Now Rebecca Stefoff, who adapated Howard Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States for younger readers, turns the updated 2008 edition of Takaki’s multicultural masterwork into A Different Mirror for Young People. Drawing on Takaki’s vast array of primary sources, and staying true to his own words whenever possible, A Different Mirror for Young People brings ethnic history alive through the words of people, including teenagers, who recorded their experiences in letters, diaries, and poems. Like Zinn’s A People’s History, Takaki’s A Different Mirror offers a rich and rewarding “people’s view” perspective on the American story.
8 / seven stories press
• Ads in Radical History and History Teacher • Promotion at ALA, CLA, and to the library market • Store and school events with Rebecca Stefoff in Portland
RONALD TAKAKI (1939–2009) was recognized as one of the foremost scholars of American ethnic history and diversity. He is the author of the multiple award–winning books Strangers from a Distant Shore: A History of Asian Americans and A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. REBECCA STEFOFF is the author of more than 100 nonfiction books for children and young adults, and she has adapted several best-selling history books for younger readers, including Howard Zinn’s masterpiece, published as A Young People’s History of the United States by Seven Stories Press. fall 2012 / 9
a Triangle square edition
will die, but first they need to get back to their island and convince their friends that Gleesome Goodday is not all that he seems. A fantastical adventure, beautifully told, unfolds in a deceptively simple tale. The Story of the Blue Planet will delight and challenge readers of all ages.
O c to b e r 2 3 , 2 0 1 2 J u v e n i l e F i c t i o n , Ag e s 8 –12 5 . 5 x 8 • 1 3 6 pa g e s hardcover
• Author tour includes Harbourfront’s International Festival of Authors in Toronto; events in New York, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Winnipeg
$ 1 2 . 9 9 US / $ 1 2 . 9 9 C a n
• Reviews and features in national print and online media
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• Excerpt available at issuu.com/sevenstories/docs/blueplanet
e b o o k IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 2 9 - 9
T he Story of t h e B lue P lanet Andri Snær Magnason
translated by Julian Meldon D’Arcy illustrations by Áslaug Jónsdóttir
B
rimir and Hulda are best friends who live on a small island on a beautiful blue planet where there are only children and no adults. Their planet is wild and at times dangerous, but everything is free, everyone is their friend, and each day is more exciting than the last. One day a rocket ship piloted by a strange-looking adult named Gleesome Goodday crashes on the beach. His business card claims he is a “DreamComeTrueMaker and joybringer,” and he promises to make life a hundred times more fun with sun-activated flying powder and magic-coated skin so that no one ever has to bathe again. Goodday even nails the sun in the sky and creates a giant wolf to chase away the clouds so it can be playtime all the time. In exchange for these wonderful things, Goodday asks only for a little bit of the children’s youth—but what is youth compared to a lot more fun? The children are so enamored of their new games that they forget all the simple activities they used to love. During Goodday’s great flying competition, Hulda and Brimir fly too high to the sun and soar to the other side of planet, where they discover it is dark all the time and the children are sickly and pale. Hulda and Brimir know that without their help, the pale children
10 / seven stories press
Andri Snær Magnason is one of Iceland’s most celebrated young writers. In 2002 LoveStar, to be published by Seven Stories also in October (see page 38), was named “Novel of the Year” by Icelandic booksellers and received the DV Literary Award and a nomination to the Icelandic Literary Prize. The Story of the Blue Planet—now published or performed in 22 countries— was the first children’s book to receive the Icelandic Literary Prize and was also the recipient of the Janusz Korczak Honorary Award and the West Nordic Children’s Book Prize. Áslaug Jónsdóttir is an illustrator, author of children’s books, artist, and graphic designer. She has written and illustrated several books for children, amongst them The Egg (Eggið, 2003), I Want Fish! (Ég vil fisk! 2007), and the awardwinning Good Evening (Gott kvöld, 2005). Julian Meldon D’Arcy is Professor of English Literature at the University of Iceland. He has written books on Scottish literature and sports, and has translated novels, poetry, and films from Icelandic, including the children’s books Flowers on the Roof and The Fisherman’s Boy and the Seal. fall 2012 / 11
a triangle square edition O c to b e r 2 3 , 2 0 1 2 J u v e n i l e n o n f i c t i o n / M e m o i r , Ag e s 12 + 5 . 5 x 8 • 4 0 0 pa g e s pa p e r b a c k
“I’ve never met Laurie Rubin, but her voice and spirit leap off the page of her riveting memoir. Despite all the obstacles and prejudice Rubin faced growing up blind, reading Do You Dream in Color? left me feeling that she’s had a charmed life. . . . Art, love, family, and connectedness are the high notes Rubin hits again and again in this unusually inspiring life story.” —Elizabeth Benedict, author of the novels Almost and The Practice of Deceit
$ 1 8 . 9 5 US / $ 1 8 . 9 5 C a n IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 24 - 4 e b o o k IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 2 5 - 1 For ages 12+
Do You Dream in Color? Insights from a Girl without Sight
Laurie Rubin
C
olors, Rubin tells us, affect everyone through sound, smell, taste, and a vast array of emotions and atmospheres. She explains that although she has been blind since birth, she has experienced color all her life. In her memoir for young adults Do You Dream in Color? Insights from a Girl without Sight, Laurie captures in vivid detail her initial diagnosis as a toddler, her adventures learning how to ski using touch and hearing alone, her disappointing experiences trying to fit in with her sighted classmates, discovering and coming to terms with her sexuality, and finally finding her sense of belonging through music and opera. Rubin describes her past as a “journey towards identity,” one she hopes will resonate with young people struggling with two fundamental questions: “Who am I?” and “Where do I fit in?” Although most of us aren’t blind, Rubin believes that many of us have traits that make us something other than “normal.” These differences, like blindness, may seem like barriers, but for the strong and the persistent, dreams can overcome barriers, no matter how large they may seem. This is what makes her story so unique yet so universal and important for young readers. 12 / seven stories press
• Book tour to coincide with performance schedule including the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC and Lincoln Center in New York, with other events in Los Angeles and San Francisco • Promotions with libraries, schools, and Jewish organizations • Co-promotions with Junior Blind • Features in national print and online media • Excerpt available at issuu.com/sevenstories/docs/ doyoudreamincolor • ARCs available at BEA
Mezzo-soprano LAURIE RUBIN recently received high praise from New York Times chief classical music critic Anthony Tommasini, who wrote that her voice displays “earthy, rich and poignant qualities.” Recent career highlights include her United Kingdom solo recital debut performance at Wigmore Hall in London, as well as her solo recital debut at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. She has recorded a CD of art songs with renowned collaborative pianists Graham Johnson and David Wilkinson. She is cofounder and associate artistic director of Ohana Arts. She also designs her own line of handmade jewelry, The LR Look. fall 2012 / 13
Seven Stories books for adults
• A complete 50-page comic book by satire-meister and Pulitzer Prize finalist Ted Rall • Promoted by a massive campaign allied with the Ballot Bandits project sponsors • Official sponsors to include Nation of Change, Puffin Foundation, Operation Push, Rock the Vote, Occupy Wall Street, TruthOut, and The Election Defense Alliance and over a hundred organizations
S e p t e mb e r 4 , 2 0 1 2 politics / current events
and media outlets who agree to feature the book on their sites • Many media outlets and celebrities will actively support this
5 x 7 • 2 24 pa g e s
publication, including Alec Baldwin, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,
pa p e r b a c k
Roseanne Barr, Willie Nelson, Ed Asner, Martin Sheen, and others
$ 1 4 . 9 5 US / $ 1 4 . 9 5 C a n
with massive Twitter followings and access to television and radio
IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 7 8 - 7
talk shows
e b o o k IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 7 9 - 4
b i l l ionair es & ba l lot ban d it s Election Games 2012
greg palast introduction by robert f. kennedy comics by ted rall
A
close presidential election in November could well come down to contested states or even districts—an election decided by vote theft? It could happen this year. Based on Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s investigative reporting for Rolling Stone and BBC television, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: Election Games 2012 will be the most important book published this year, one that could save the election. Billionaires & Ballot Bandits names the filthy-rich sugar-daddies who are super-funding the Super-PACs of both parties––colorful Richie Rich-Kids with nicknames like “The Ice Man,” “The Vulture” and, of course, The Brothers Koch. The story of the billionaires and why they want to buy an election is matched with the nine ways they can steal the election. His story of the sophisticated new trickery will pick up on Palast’s giant New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
14 / seven stories press
• Excerpts in The Nation, In These Times, Fire Dog Lake, Occupy.com, Progressive, Rolling Stone and film segments will air on Democracy Now!, CurrentTV, BBC America, the Pacifica Radio Network, The Young Turks • Promotion with web-film series, television broadcasts and national tour, social networking push combined with major print and web advertising
Bestselling author Greg Palast’s most recent book is Vulture’s Picnic. Author of a number of previous bestsellers, including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and Armed Madhouse, Greg Palast is currently a Nation Institute Fellow and BBC correspondent. He lives in New York City and Long Island.
fall 2012 / 15
“A stunning book. I found myself dreaming conversations with some of the writers . . . engaging in the conversation they begin here.” —Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina
A u g u s t 7, 2 0 1 2
“This intimate book gives you all the tools for self-emergence.” —Janeane Garofalo
M ental Healt h / W o men ’ s S t u dies 6 x 8 • 2 8 8 pa g e s pa p e r b a c k $ 1 9 . 9 5 US / $ 1 9 . 9 5 C a n
“Live Through This strikes me in all ways as a carefully crafted object—which so few books are these days.” —Feministing.com
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L i v e Throug h T h is , 2 nd editio n On Creativity and Self-Destruction
Sabrina Chap
N
ow in its second edition, with a new foreword by Amanda Palmer and new contributions from comedian Margaret Cho and street artist Swoon, Live Through This is an unprecedented, intimate exploration of self-destruction and creativity by some of our most daring writers and artists. A visceral look at the bizarre entanglement of destructive and creative forces, Live Through This is a collection of original stories, essays, artwork, and photography. It explores the uses of art to overcome abuse, incest, madness, and depression, and the often deep-seated impulse toward self-destruction including cutting, eating disorders, and addiction. Here, some of our most compelling cartoonists, novelists, poets, dancers, playwrights, and burlesque performers traverse the pains and passions that can both motivate and destroy women artists, and mark the path to survival. Taken together, these artful reflections offer an honest and hopeful journey through a woman’s silent rage, through the ways struggles with destruction can be empowering, and the ensuing possibilities for transforming that burning force into external release as art.
16 / seven stories press
“The [contributors to] Live Through This testify to lives of survival-turning tears and tendencies toward mania, depression, and self-mutilation into powerful lessons.” —Curve Magazine • This second edition features a new foreword and two new essays • Updated resource list included • Book tour to coincide with editor’s performance schedule • More information on authors website sabrinachap.com
Sabrina Chap is a playwright, singer-songwriter, and spoken word artist originally from the suburbs of Chicago. Her plays, including perhaps merely quiet, have been produced in the United States and Europe.
fall 2012 / 17
S e p t e mb e r 4 , 2 0 1 2 A u to bi o grap h y / M em o ir 5 . 5 x 8 . 2 5 • 4 8 0 pa g e s
“As I read this book I thought: This is exactly why they’ve kept women ignorant for so long; why they haven’t wanted us to learn to read and write. ‘They’ (you can fill this in) knew we would tell our stories from our point of view and that all the terrible things done to us against our will would be exposed, and that we would free ourselves from controlling pretensions, half-truths, and lies.” —from the foreword by Alice Walker
hardcover $ 26 . 9 5 US / $ 26 . 9 5 C a n IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 1 4 - 5 e b o o k IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 1 5 - 2
Ma, He Sold Me For a Few Cigarettes A Memoir of Dublin in the 1950s
Martha Long
wi t h a fo r e wo r d by al ic e wal k er
W
hen Martha Long’s feckless mother hooks up with Jackser (“that bandy aul bastard”), and starts having more babies, the abuse and poverty in the house grow more acute. Martha is regularly sent out to beg and more often steal, and her wiles (as a child of 7, 8) are often the only thing keeping food on the table. Jackser is a master of paranoid anger and outburst, keeping the children in an unheated tenement, unable to go to school, at the ready for his unpredictable rages. Then Martha is sent by Jackser to a man he knows in exchange for the price of a few cigarettes. She is nine. Martha treasures the time alone with her mother, but amazingly Ma pines for Jackser and they eventually return to Dublin and the other children. And yet there are prized cartoon magazines, the occasional hidden penny to buy the children sweets, the glimpse of loving family life in other houses, and Martha’s hope that she will soon be old enough to make her own way.
18 / seven stories press
“A tale of strength, bravery and sheer determination of not letting life beat you.” —Irish Post “An ultimately uplifting story which salutes the strength of the human spirit.” —Irish World “[Long’s] story is unique in its rawness and its honesty. Entirely self-educated, she narrates her own life in a way which is both riveting and moving.” —Greenock Telegraph • All four books in the “Ma” series have reached #1 on the Irish Times bestseller list • Author tour to New York, Boston, and Chicago • Reviews in mainstream publications and women’s magazines • Excerpt available at issuu.com/sevenstories/docs/mahesoldme
MARTHA LONG was born in Dublin in the 1950s and still lives there today. She is the author of six “Ma” books, all of which have been bestsellers in Ireland. She calls herself a “middle-aged matron” and has successfully reared three children.
fall 2012 / 19
• Author tour to Washington, DC; New York; and Baltimore • Promotion through author’s online newsletter Too Much and union websites and newsletters • Excerpt available at issuu.com/sevenstories/docs/ S e p t e mb e r 1 1 , 2 0 1 2 Politics / Economic Conditions
richdontalwayswin • Reviews in mainstream, labor, and Occupy media
5 . 5 x 8 . 2 5 • 3 8 4 pa g e s pa p e r b a c k $ 1 8 . 9 5 US / $ 1 8 . 9 5 C a n IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 3 4 - 3 e b o o k IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 3 5 - 0
The Rich Don’t Always Win The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class
Sam Pizzigati
T
he Occupy Wall Street protests have captured America’s political imagination. Polls show that two-thirds of the nation now believe that America’s enormous wealth ought to be “distributed more evenly.” However, almost as many Americans—well over half—feel the protests will ultimately have “little impact” on inequality in America. What explains this disconnect? Most Americans have resigned themselves to believing that the rich simply always get their way. Except they don’t. A century ago, the United States hosted a super-rich even more domineering than ours today. Yet fifty years later, that super-rich had almost entirely disappeared. Their majestic mansions and estates had become museums and college campuses, and America had become a vibrant, mass middle-class nation, the first and finest the world had ever seen. This lively popular history will speak directly to the political hopelessness so many Americans feel. By tracing how average Americans took down plutocracy over the first half of the twentieth century—and how plutocracy came back—The Rich Don’t Always Win will outfit Occupy Wall Street America with a deeper understanding of what we need to do to get the United States back on track to the American dream. 20 / seven stories press
A veteran labor journalist, SAM PIZZIGATI has written widely on economic inequality for both popular and scholarly readers. His op-eds and articles on income and wealth have appeared in a host of major American dailies, from the New York Times to the Miami Herald, and a broad variety of magazines and journals. His last book, Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits Our Lives, won a coveted “outstanding title” rating of the year Choice rating from the American Library Association. Pizzigati ran the publishing operations of America’s largest union, the 3.2 million-member National Education Association, for twenty years and now serves as an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. His online weekly on excess and inequality, Too Much, goes to a national audience of journalists, researchers, and economic justice activists. Pizzigati has appeared as an expert commentator on inequality on 150+ radio and TV talk and news programs, from Pacifica to Fox Business News.
fall 2012 / 21
• Full-color art throughout • Simultaneous release of hardcover and paperback on the anniversary of the start of the Occupy Wall Street movement S e p t e mb e r 1 8 , 2 0 1 2
• National and international media coverage and reviews
Politics / Economic Conditions
• Excerpt available at issuu.com/sevenstories/docs/memewars
8 . 5 x 1 1 • 4 0 0 pa g e s pa p e r b a c k / h a r d c o v e r $ 2 9 . 9 5 / $ 1 0 0 . 0 0 US / C a n pa p e r b a c k IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 7 3 - 2 h a r d c o v e r IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 3 2 - 9 e b o o k IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 3 3 - 6
Me me Wars
The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics
Kalle Lasn with Adbusters
F
rom the editor and magazine that started and named the Occupy Wall Street movement, Meme Wars is an articulation of what could be the next steps in rethinking and remaking our world that challenges and debunks many of the assumptions of neoclassical economics and brings to light a more ecological model. Meme Wars aims to accelerate the shift into this new paradigm that takes into account psychonomics, bionomics, and other aspects of our physical and mental environment that are often left out in discussions of economics. Like Adbusters, the book will be image-heavy and full color throughout, a textbook for the future that provides the building blocks, in texts and visuals, for a new way of looking at and changing our world. Through an examination of alternative economies, Lasn spurs students to become “barefoot economists” and to see that a humanization of economics is possible. Meme Wars will include contributions from Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Samuelson, George Akerlof, Lourdes Benería, Julie Matthaei, Manfred Max-Neef, David Orrell, Paul Gilding, Mathis Wackernagel, and the father of ecological economics Herman Daly, among others.
22 / seven stories press
KALLE LASN is an internationally known, award-winning documentarian. He is publisher of Adbusters magazine and founder of the Adbusters Media Foundation and Powershift Advertising Agency. Lasn has dedicated himself to launching social marketing campaigns with Adbusters such as Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week, and to fighting legal battles for the right to access the public airwaves, primarily through the anticapitalist tactic of culture jamming. Lasn, along with Adbusters senior editor Micah White and Adbusters’ 90,000-strong global network of activists were the instigators of the first #OccupyWallStreet event on September 17, 2011. ADBUSTERS is a not-for-profit, reader-supported, advertising-free, 70,000-circulation magazine that lays bare anticapitalist, pro-environment concerns through incisive philosophical essays, activist commentary, and advertising spoofs. Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Adbusters past and present contributors include Slavoj Žižek, David Graeber, Simon Critchley, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Matt Taibbi, Bill McKibben, Douglas Rushkoff, Jonathan Cook, and Chris Hedges.
fall 2012 / 23
• 16 pages of photographs taken by Bruce Davidson • Events in New York City with author, photographer, and subject • National and international media coverage and reviews • Excerpt available at issuu.com/sevenstories/docs/bobbysbook S e p t e mb e r 1 8 , 2 0 1 2 B i o grap h y / M em o ir 6 x 9 • 1 6 0 pa g e s pa p e r b a c k $ 2 1 . 0 0 US / $ 2 1 . 0 0 C a n IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 4 8 - 0 e b o o k IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 49 - 7
Bo bby’s Bo ok
Emily Davidson as told by Robert Powers Photographs by Bruce Davidson
I
n 1998, at the very moment that a publisher had approached Bruce Davidson about a book of his 1959 Brooklyn Gang photographs, former gang leader Bobby Powers unexpectedly telephoned the Davidsons. Over the next decade, Emily Davidson maintained an ongoing conversation with Powers in order to bring to light his struggle to overcome his drugridden and violent past and to inspire others with his example. Beginning in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood in the mid 1950s where alcohol abuse and poverty were rampant, Bobby Powers went from being an illiterate gang leader and notorious drug dealer to a destroyed individual who had lost everything, including family members, close friends, and himself, all presented in his own words and in grim detail in this book. At a critical turning point in his life, recognizing the threat of his behaviors to survival, he entered detox and embarked on the arduous path to recovery and self-understanding. Having achieved a new way of life as a responsible and caring adult, Bobby Powers is today, at 69, a nationally respected drug addiction counselor who has aided a wide spectrum of people, including former gang members. His story represents a brutal and inspiring lesson in human frailty, degradation, and transformation.
24 / seven stories press
EMILY HAAS DAVIDSON was born and grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. After graduating from Bard College with a degree in history, she studied acting in London and performed with the Arena Theater in Washington, DC. In 1967 she married Bruce Davidson and traded life on the stage to work as a photographer’s collaborator. BRUCE DAVIDSON was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1933. After attending Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University, he completed military service in 1957 and began working as a photographer for Life Magazine. In 1958, he became a member of Magnum Agency. He has had one-man exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, The Walker Art Center, The International Center of Photography, The Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, The Aperture Foundation, and The Foundation Cartier-Bresson in Paris. He has received numerous grants and awards including two grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Photography in 2004, and the Gold Medal Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Arts Club in 2007. He has also directed three films.
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O c to b e r 2 , 2 0 1 2 C o m i c s / C l a s s i c L i t e r at u r e 8 x 1 0 . 8 7 5 • 5 1 2 pa g e s pa p e r b a c k $ 3 4 . 9 5 US / $ 3 4 . 9 5 C a n IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 3 7 8 - 0
T he Grap hic C a no n, Volume 2
From “Kubla Khan” to the Brontë Sisters to The Picture of Dorian Gray
Russ Kick
“Looks to be the graphic publishing literary event of the year.” —Calvin Reid, Publishers Weekly
T
he Graphic Canon, Volume 2 gives us a visual cornucopia based on the wealth of literature from the 1800s. Several artists—including Maxon Crumb and Gris Grimly—present their versions of Edgar Allan Poe’s visions. The great American novel Huckleberry Finn is adapted uncensored for the first time, as Twain wrote it. The bad boys of Romanticism—Shelley, Keats, and Byron—are visualized here, and so are the Brontë sisters. We see both of Coleridge’s most famous poems: “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (the latter by British comics legend Hunt Emerson). Philosophy and science are ably represented by ink versions of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Frankenstein, Moby-Dick, Les Misérables, Great Expectations, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment (a hallucinatory take on the pivotal murder scene), Thoreau’s Walden (in spare line art by John Porcellino of King-Cat Comics fame), “The 26 / seven stories press
Drunken Boat” by Rimbaud, Leaves of Grass by Whitman, and two of Emily Dickinson’s greatest poems are all present and accounted for. John Coulthart has created ten magnificent full-page collages that tell the story of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. And Pride and Prejudice has never looked this splendiferous! This volume is a special treat for Lewis Carroll fans. Dame Darcy puts her unmistakable stamp on—what else?—the Alice books in a new 16-page tour-de-force, while a dozen other artists present their versions of the most famous characters and moments from Wonderland. There’s also a gorgeous silhouetted telling of “Jabberwocky,” and Mahendra’s Singh’s surrealistic take on “The Hunting of the Snark.” Curveballs in this volume include fairy tales illustrated by the untameable S. Clay Wilson, a fiery speech from freed slave Frederick Douglass (rendered in stark black and white by Seth Tobocman), a letter on reincarnation from Flaubert, the Victorian erotic classic Venus in Furs, the drug classic The Hasheesh Eater, and silk-screened illustrations for the ghastly children’s classic Der Struwwelpeter. Among many other canonical works. • Major review coverage in national and international media • Author tour to Chicago; Ohio; Madison, WI; and Iowa City in October, and Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland in November and December with promotion at comic cons across the country • Excerpt available at issuu.com/sevenstories/docs/ graphiccanonv2 • Appearance at the Brooklyn Book Fest and Decatur Book Fair
Russ Kick’s bestselling anthologies, including You Are Being Lied To and Everything You Know Is Wrong, have sold over half a million copies. The New York Times has dubbed Kick “an information archaeologist.” He lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee, and Tucson, Arizona. fall 2012 / 27
Project Censored affiliates in universities and at media organizations all over the world. A perennial favorite of booksellers, teachers, and readers everywhere, Censored is one of the strongest life signs of our current collective desire to get the news we citizens need— despite what Big Media tells us. O c to b e r 2 , 2 0 1 2 Media Studies 5 . 5 x 8 . 5 • 4 6 4 pa g e s pa p e r b a c k $ 1 9 . 9 5 US / $ 1 9 . 9 5 C a n IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 2 8 - 2 e b o o k IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 2 9 - 9
C e nsored 2 013
The Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis of 2011–2012
Mickey Huff with Project Censored cartoons by Khalil Bendib
“Americans—now more than ever—need those outlets that do labor to report some truth. Project Censored is not just among the bravest, smartest, and most rigorous of those outlets, but the only one that’s wholly focused on those stories that the corporate press ignores, downplays and/or distorts. This latest book is therefore a must-read for anyone who cares about this country, its tottering economy, and—most important—what’s now left of its democracy.” —Mark Crispin Miller • Author tour in Northern California • Cartoons throughout by Khalil Bendib • National and international media coverage and reviews
Every year since 1976, Project Censored, our nation’s oldest news-monitoring group—a university-wide project at Sonoma State University founded by Carl Jensen, directed for many years by Peter Phillips, and now under the leadership of Mickey Huff—has produced a Top-25 list of underreported news stories and a book, Censored, dedicated to the stories that ought to be top features on the nightly news, but that are missing because of media bias and self-censorship. Beyond the Top-25 stories, additional chapters delve further into timely media topics: The Censored News and Media Analysis section provides annual updates on Junk Food News and News Abuse, Censored Déjà Vu, signs of hope in the alternative and news media, and the state of media bias and alternative coverage around the world. In the Truth Emergency section, scholars and journalists take a critical look at the US/NATO military-industrial-media empire. And in the Project Censored International section, the meaning of media democracy worldwide is explored in close association with 28 / seven stories press
MICKEY HUFF is the director of Project Censored and an associate professor of history and social science at Diablo Valley College. He is the co-host of the Project Censored radio show on KPFA’s The Morning Mix. PROJECT CENSORED, founded in 1976 by Carl Jensen at Sonoma State University, has as its principal objective the advocacy for and protection of First Amendment rights and the freedom of information in the United States. In 2008, Project Censored received the PEN/Oakland Literary Censorship Award for the publication of Censored 2009.
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“This is social satire at its wittiest and most engaging.” —Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States O c to b e r 1 6 , 2 0 1 2 Comics / Media Tie-in 7. 5 x 7. 5 • 1 4 4 pa g e s pa p e r b a c k
“McMillan’s expressive style, pared down to the basics and intensified over the years, allows for instant communication of thoughtful rage.” —Comics Journal
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T he Beginn ing o f t h e A merica n Fall
“Her politics are perfect, her drawings sly and subtle, and her dialogue funny as hell.” —Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame • Author tour to New York, San Francisco/Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, Boston, and Washington, DC
A Comics Journalist Inside the Occupy Wall Street Movement
• Stephanie McMillan is the winner of the 2012 Robert F. Kennedy
Stephanie McMillan
• Excerpt available at issuu.com/sevenstories/docs/americanfall
Winner of the 2012 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award
C
an a cartoonist and millions of random strangers change the world? The initial stages of their attempt are chronicled in this book of comics-journalism and written observations. Stephanie McMillan, long-time activist and cartoonist, has waited her entire life for the American people to rise up. Sparked by uprisings around the world, a new movement bursts onto the national scene against a system that denies the people a decent life and puts the planet at risk. With delightful drawings, interviews, dialogue, description, and insightful reflections, this book chronicles the first several months of the fragile and contradictory movement. It situates detailed personal experiences and representative narratives within the broad context of a truly unique and historical global conjuncture. This book will stand as a record of the emerging movement in accessible comics form.
30 / seven stories press
Journalism Award
Stephanie McMillan has been a political cartoonist since 1992. She self-syndicates Code Green, a weekly editorial cartoon focused on the environmental emergency, and creates the comic strip Minimum Security five days a week for Universal Uclick. Both can be seen on her website: StephanieMcMillan.org. Her award-winning cartoons have appeared in hundreds of publications worldwide including the Los Angeles Times, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Daily Beast, Yes! magazine, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, plus many textbooks and anthologies. She has been an activist since the early 1980s, working on issues such as imperialist war, immigrant rights, police brutality, and women’s reproductive freedom. She currently works with an anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist collective called One Struggle. She is the winner of the 2012 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. fall 2012 / 31
O c to b e r 2 3 , 2 0 1 2 F i c t i o n / L i t e r at u r e 5 . 5 x 8 . 2 5 • 3 2 0 pa g e s pa p e r b a c k $ 1 6 . 9 5 US / $ 1 6 . 9 5 C a n IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 26 - 8
“A biting satire on the most topical issues in the public arena today—such as the exploitation of natural resources, dubious alliances between science and marketing, the crushing might of the conglomerates—that works as an indictment of our obsession with technology, the idolization of our leaders, and our subservience to the market. In a nutshell: a highly entertaining and incredibly exciting story that will set your imagination flying.” —Thorgerdur Sigurdardottir, Icelandic National Television
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L oveStar
A Novel
Andri Snær Magnason
I
n the not-too-distant dystopian future, LoveStar, the enigmatic and obsessively driven founder of the LoveStar corporation, has unlocked the key to transmitting data via birdwaves, thus freeing mankind from wires and devices, and allowing consumerism, technology, and science to run rampant over all aspects of daily life. Cordless modern men and women are paid to howl advertisements at unsuspecting passers-by, REGRET machines eliminate doubt over roads not taken, soul mates are identified and brought together (while existing, unscientifically validated relationships are driven remorselessly apart), and rocketing the dead into the sky becomes both a status symbol and a beautiful, cathartic show for those left behind. Indridi and Sigrid, two blissfully happy young lovers, have their perfect worlds threatened (along with Indridi’s sanity) when they are calculated apart and forced to go to extreme lengths to prove their love. Their journey ultimately takes them on a collision course with LoveStar, who is on his own mission to find what might become the last idea in the world. Steeped in influences ranging from Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Kurt Vonnegut to George Orwell, Douglas Adams, and Monty Python, Andri Snær Magnason has created a surreal yet uncomfortably familiar world, where the honey embrace of love does its utmost to survive amid relentless hypercalculation.
32 / seven stories press
• Author tour includes Harbourfront’s International Festival of Authors in Toronto; events in New York, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Winnipeg • Reviews and features in national print and online media • Excerpt available at issuu.com/sevenstories/docs/lovestar
Andri Snær Magnason is one of Iceland’s most celebrated young writers. In 2002 LoveStar was named “Novel of the Year” by Icelandic booksellers and received the DV Literary Award and a nomination to the Icelandic Literary Prize. His children’s book, The Story of the Blue Planet—now published or performed in 22 countries—was the first children’s book to receive the Icelandic Literary Prize and was also the recipient of the Janusz Korczak Honorary Award and the West Nordic Children’s Book Prize. Andri is the winner of the 2010 Kairos Award. Seven Stories Press will publish The Story of the Blue Planet also in October. See page 10. Victoria Cribb has degrees from the University of Cambridge, University College London, and the University of Iceland. Her translations from Icelandic include The Blue Fox, From the Mouth of the Whale, and The Whispering Muse by Sjón; Stone Tree by Gyrðir Elíasson; and Arctic Chill, Hypothermia, and Operation Napoleon by Arnaldur Indriðason. fall 2012 / 33
“An excellent reading guide to Kurt’s work.” —Mark Vonnegut
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“Gregory D. Sumner has perceived [the] directness in Vonnegut’s novels, and correlates the author’s life and works in an engaging, almost spellbinding manner.” —Jerome Klinkowitz, author of Vonnegut in Fact, Vonnegut in Effect, and Kurt Vonnegut’s America
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U nstuck in T im e
A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels
Gregory D. Sumner
I
n Unstuck in Time, Gregory Sumner guides us, with insight and passion, through a biography of fifteen of Kurt Vonnegut’s best-known works—his fourteen novels starting with Player Piano (1952) all the way to an epilogue on his last book, A Man Without a Country (2005)—to illustrate the quintessential American writer’s profound engagement with the “American Dream” in its various forms. Sumner gives us a poignant portrait of Vonnegut and his resistance to celebrating the traditional values associated with the American Dream: grandiose ambition, unbridled material success, rugged individualism, and “winners” over “losers.” Instead of a celebration of these values, we read and share Vonnegut’s outrage, his brokenhearted empathy for those who struggle under the ethos of survival-of-the-fittest in the frontier mentality--something he once memorably described as “an impossibly tough-minded experiment in loneliness.” Heroic and tragic, Vonnegut’s novels reflect the pain of his own life’s experiences, relieved by small acts of kindness, friendship, and love that exemplify another way of living, another sort of human utopia, an alternative American Dream, and the reason we always return to his books. 34 / seven stories press
“I read with wonder and delight the biographical sketches so gracefully fused with a montage of Vonnegut stories and the ideas they dramatize. Unstuck in Time is an achievement of scholarship illuminated by a fan’s contagious enthusiasm.” —Sidney Offit, author of Friends, Writers and Other Countrymen • Publication to coincide with Kurt Vonnegut’s November 11 birthday • Author talks in the Indianapolis Metropolitan area • Excerpt available at issuu.com/sevenstories/docs/unstuckintime
GREGORY D. SUMNER, JD, PhD, is chair of history at the University of Detroit Mercy, where he has taught since 1993. He holds a doctorate in American history from Indiana University and is the author of Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle. Sumner has been awarded summer fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has twice been William J. Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the Université di Roma Tre.
fall 2012 / 35
N o v e mb e r 2 0 , 2 0 1 2 C o m i c s / C l a s s i c L i t e r at u r e 8 . 5 x 1 0 . 8 7 5 • 5 1 2 pa g e s pa p e r b a c k $ 3 4 . 9 5 US / $ 3 4 . 9 5 C a n IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 4 3 8 0 - 3
T h e Grap hic C a non, Vo lume 3
From Heart of Darkness to Hemingway to Infinite Jest
Russ Kick
T
he classic literary canon meets the comics artists, illustrators, and other artists who have remade reading in Russ Kick’s magisterial, three-volume, full-color The Graphic Canon, volumes 1, 2, and 3. Volume 3 brings to life the literature of the end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first, including a Sherlock Holmes mystery, an H. G. Wells story, an illustrated guide to the Beat writers, a one-act play from Zora Neale Hurston, a disturbing meditation on Naked Lunch, Rilke’s soul-stirring Letters to a Young Poet, Anaïs Nin’s diaries, the visions of Black Elk, the heroin classic The Man With the Golden Arm (published four years before William Burroughs’ Junky), and the postmodernism of Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Kathy Acker, Raymond Carver, and Donald Barthelme. The towering works of modernism are here—T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land,” Yeats’s “The Second Coming” done as a magazine spread, Heart of Darkness, stories from Kafka, The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses, and his short story “Araby” from Dubliners, rare early work from Faulkner and Hemingway (by artists who have drawn for Marvel), and poems by Gertrude Stein and Edna St. Vincent Millay. 36 / seven stories press
You’ll also find original comic versions of short stories by W. Somerset Maugham, Flannery O’Connor, and Saki (manga style), plus adaptations of Lolita (and everyone said it couldn’t be done!), The Age of Innocence, Siddhartha and Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Last Exit to Brooklyn, J. G. Ballard’s Crash, and photo-dioramas for Animal Farm and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Feast your eyes on new full-page illustrations for 1984, Brave New World, Waiting for Godot, One Hundred Years of Solitude,The Bell Jar, On the Road, Lord of the Flies, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and three Borges stories. Robert Crumb’s rarely seen adaptation of Nausea captures Sartre’s existential dread. Dame Darcy illustrates Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece, Blood Meridian, universally considered one of the most brutal novels ever written and long regarded as unfilmable by Hollywood. Tara Seibel, the only female artist involved with the Harvey Pekar Project, turns in an exquisite series of illustrations for The Great Gatsby. And then there’s the moment we’ve been waiting for: the first graphic adaptation from Kurt Vonnegut’s masterwork, Slaughterhouse-Five. Among many other gems. • Major review coverage in national and international media • Author tour to Chicago; Ohio; Madison, WI; and Iowa City in October; and Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland in November and December with promotion at comic cons across the country • Excerpt available at issuu.com/sevenstories/docs/ graphiccanonv3 • Appearance at the Brooklyn Book Fest and Decatur Book Fair
Russ Kick’s bestselling anthologies, including You Are Being Lied To and Everything You Know Is Wrong, have sold over half a million copies. The New York Times has dubbed Kick “an information archaeologist.” Russ Kick lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee, and Tucson, Arizona. fall 2012 / 37
N o v e mb e r 2 0 , 2 0 1 2 C o m i c s / C l a s s i c L i t e r at u r e 8 . 5 x 1 0 . 8 7 5 • 1 , 5 3 6 pa g e s t h r e e - pa p e r b a c k b ox e d s e t $ 1 0 4 . 9 5 US / $ 1 0 4 . 9 5 C a n IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 3 8 3 - 4
T h e grap h ic ca no n, B ox ed set russ k ick
Paradise Lost by John Milton Artist Rebecca Dart Volume 1
T
he classic canon of Western civilization meets the artists and illustrators who have remade reading in the last years of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century in Russ Kick’s magisterial, three-volume, full-color The Graphic Canon, volumes 1, 2, and 3. This special slipcase edition includes all three volumes of the series in an attractively designed slipcase, allowing graphic novel collectors and fans to quickly add this seminal work to their library. For more information about this project visit graphiccanon.com.
“Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll Artist Eran Cantrell Volume 2
• Major review coverage • Author tour to Chicago; Ohio; Madison, WI; Iowa City in October; and Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland in November and December with promotion at comic cons across the country • Appearance at the Brooklyn Book Fest and Decatur Book Fair Chéri by Colette Artist Molly Crabapple Volume 3
38 / seven stories press
fall 2012 / 39
“. . . In urging the West to abandon its prejudices and fundamentally rethink its ideology, [Loretta Napoleoni] is asking the right questions.” —Morning Star
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“This thoughtful and incisive inquiry yields much insight into some of the most important issues of today, and tomorrow.” —Noam Chomsky on Napoleoni’s Terror Incorporated
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Maonomics
Why Chinese Communists Make Better Capitalists Than We Do
Loretta Napoleoni Translated by Stephen Twilley
I
n Maonomics: Why Chinese Communists Make Better Capitalists Than We Do, bestselling author and economics Loretta Napoleoni probes the Chinese economics miracle to find whether, behind it, there is a uniquely Chinese vision of democracy, one that might inspire Westerners. Highlighting China’s focus on economics opportunity and the fair distribution of wealth and prosperity rather than the Western emphasis on voting, Napoleoni asks provocative questions such as: Is China realizing Marx’s goal of an egalitarian society that uses profit to benefit its people? The end of the Cold War was thought to signal the triumph of Western capitalism over communism. In Maonomics, Napoleoni shines a light on the peaceful economic revolution that is shifting the balance of power in the world from West to East.
40 / seven stories press
• Author tour to North America with a stop at Johns Hopkins University, with other events in New York, Chicago, Toronto, Seattle, and Eugene, Oregon • Features in national print and online media
Loretta Napoleoni is the author of the bestselling book Rogue Economics: Capitalism’s New Reality (a Publishers Weekly Best Book 2008) and Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Money Behind Global Terrorism. One of the world’s leading experts on money laundering and terror financing, Napoleoni has worked as a correspondent and columnist for La Stampa, La Repubblica, El País, and Le Monde, and she has presented on the economics of terrorism for Google UK and TEDTalks. She teaches economics at the Judge Business School in Cambridge.
fall 2012 / 41
Praise for Tea of Ulaanbaatar:
J an u ary 8 , 2 0 1 3 F i c t i o n / S h o r t S to r i e s 5 . 5 x 8 • 24 0 pa g e s pa p e r b a c k
“Like Robert Bingham’s Lighting on the Sun, Tea of Ulaanbaatar is a merciless dissection of lost young American volunteers drifting through a violent and absurd thirdworld capital, helping no one, especially themselves. Christopher Howard’s sharp, spare voice delivers a nightmarish geo-noir.” —Stewart O’Nan, author of Last Night at the Lobster
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P r i nce of th e Wo r ld Stories
Christopher Howard
I
n these six stories, Christopher Howard reasserts his talent for evoking the gritty and the apocalyptic with poetic grace. “Intelligent People Speaking Reasonably” follows two Iraq vets adrift in the civilian life of the Pacific Northwest. “Space is Kindness” witnesses the unexpected death of Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan from the perspective of a local reporter and a photographer rushing to the crash-site in 2000. “Darkstar” takes place in Dublin and follows a young outcast named Sailor through grimy, pre Apocalyptic streets as he tries to find the soulmate he hasn’t seen since childhood. “Son of Man” tells the story of the Manson family from the perspective of one of its members. “How to Make Millions in the Oil Market” contemplates the absurdity of war from the point of view of a Blackwater contractor first in the chaos of Iraq and later in the relative peace of the US. The epic title story “Prince of the World” follows a mixed-race orphan named Labelle as he wanders north along the Mississippi, ultimately caught in the infamous Starved Rock Massacre in Howard’s home-state of Illinois.
42 / seven stories press
“It’s youthful idealism gone wild in Howard’s striking debut. . . . Tight and witty writing.” —Publishers Weekly “An accomplished novel written with a keen sense of atmosphere and description.” —Library Journal • Excerpt available at issuu.com/sevenstories/docs/ princeoftheworld • Features in national print and online media
Christopher Howard grew up in Illinois and spent a few months of an aborted Peace Corps sojourn in Mongolia in the late 1990s. His short story, “How to Make Millions in the Oil Market,” published in McSweeney’s, was nominated for the 2008 National Magazine Award in Fiction. His first novel, Tea of Ulaanbaatar, was published by Seven Stories Press in 2011.
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recently published
Politics / Current Events 6 x 9 • 24 0 pa g e s pa p e r b a c k P h il o s o p h y / R eligi o n
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G od in Pain
Inversion of Apocalypse
Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gunjević T ransl ate d by El l en E l ias-Bu rsać
A
brilliant dissection and reconstruction of the three major faith-based systems of belief in the world today— Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—by one of the world’s most articulate philosophers, Slavoj Žižek, in conversation with Croatian theologian and priest Boris Gunjevi´c. God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse shows how each of the world’s major faith-based systems of thought understand humanity and divinity—and how the differences between the faiths may be far stranger than they may at first seem. Publishers Weekly has called Žižek “One of the few living writers to combine theoretical rigor with compulsive readability.” And none other than Terry Eagleton has described him as “that rare breed of writer—one who is both lucid and esoteric.” “[Žižek is the] most dangerous philosopher in the West.” —Adam Kirsch, New Review “Žižek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is the master of counterintuitive observation.” —The New Yorker
44 / seven stories press
T h e Bo o k o f Obama
From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt
Ted Rall
H
ow did a charismatic young president elected in an atmosphere of optimism and expectation lead the United States to the brink of revolution? From a chance encounter in the early 1980s to the Democratic primaries of 2007–08, syndicated columnist and political cartoonist Ted Rall was one of the first to size up Barack Obama as we know him now: conservative, risk-averse, and tonedeaf. In The Book of Obama, Rall revisits the rapid rise and dizzying fall of Obama—and the emergence of the Tea Party and Occupy movements—and draws a startling conclusion: We the People weren’t lied to. We lied to ourselves, both about Obama and the two-party system. We voted when we ought to have revolted. “What Rall is, is a political incendiary device, a left-wing fusion reactor.” —San Diego Union-Tribune “[Ted Rall] has dusted off the R-word at exactly the right moment in American history. He wants a revolution. And I agree with him.” —Charles Young, ThisCantBeHappening.net
• Author tour to Portland, Seattle, Tacoma, Bellingham, San Francisco, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York • Promotions at comic cons around the country
recently published / 45
C o m i c s / C l a s s i c L i t e r at u r e 8 . 5 x 1 0 . 8 7 5 • 5 1 2 pa g e s pa p e r b a c k $ 3 4 . 9 5 US / $ 3 4 . 9 5 C a n IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 3 76 - 6 e b o o k IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 3 7 7 - 3
T h e G rap h ic C a no n, Volu me 1
From The Epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Dangerous Liaisons
Russ Kick
T
he classic literary canon meets the comics artists, illustrators, and other contemporary artists who have remade reading in Russ Kick’s magisterial, three-volume, full-color The Graphic Canon, volumes 1, 2, and 3. Volume 1 takes us on a visual tour from the earliest literature through the end of the 1700s. We’re treated to eye-popping renditions of the human race’s greatest epics—Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Odyssey (in watercolors by Gareth Hinds), Aeneid, Beowulf, and The Arabian Nights, plus later epics The Divine Comedy and The Canterbury Tales (both by Seymour Chwast) and Paradise Lost—as well as two of ancient Greece’s greatest plays, Euripides’ tragedy Medea and Aristophanes’ bawdy comedy Lysistrata. Also included is Robert Crumb’s rarely seen adaptation of James Boswell’s London Journal, filled with philosophical debate and lowbrow debauchery. Religious lit is well covered: the Books of Daniel and Esther, Rick Geary’s new rendition of the Book of Revelation, the Tao Te Ching, Rumi’s Sufi poetry, and the Mayan holy book Popol Vuh. The Eastern canon gets its due, with The Tale of Genji, three poems from China’s golden age of literature by Sharon Rudahl, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and other works from Asia. 46 / seven stories press
Two of Shakespeare’s greatest plays and two of his sonnets are here, as are Plato’s Symposium, Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Renaissance poetry of love and desire, and Don Quixote visualized by the legendary Will Eisner. Unexpected twists in this volume include a Native American folktale, an Incan play, Sappho’s poetic fragments, essays by Benjamin Franklin, love letters of Abelard and Héloïse, and the decadent French classic Dangerous Liaisons, as illustrated by Molly Crabapple. See details for Volume 2 on page 16 and details for Volume 3 and the complete boxed set on page 26. “The Graphic Canon is startlingly brilliant. . . . This is a masterpiece of literary choices as well as art and interpretation. It is a perfect graduation or summer-reading present, and the solid editing, including introductory notes for each piece, makes it a required purchase for any library.” —School Library Journal “Through the reprinted and newly-produced work of 59 (mainly American) adapters and 58 adapted titles, this is not only a survey of the world’s diverse artistic past, but also a breathtaking glimpse of this young medium’s incredible future.” —Booklist (starred review) “This meaty slab is laced with more wit, beauty, social commentary and shock than one might expect. . . . If artists, as British sculptor Anish Kapoor famously said, make mythologies, then this volume is genuinely a marriage of equals.” —Kirkus Reviews “Looks like a must-buy for all academic libraries, many public libraries, and many high schools, and an exciting new benchmark for comics!” —Library Journal recently published / 47
E n v ir o nment / A rctic St u dies / A nt h o lo gy 6 x 9 • 5 6 0 pa g e s
P o etry
3 2 pa g e s o f f u l l- c o l o r p h oto g r a p h s
6 x 9 • 3 5 2 pa g e s
hardcover
hardcover
$ 3 5 . 9 5 US / $ 3 5 . 9 5 C a n
$ 3 2 . 0 0 US / $ 3 2 . 0 0 C a n
IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 3 8 5 - 8
IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 3 74 - 2
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e b o o k IS B N : 9 7 8 - 1 - 6 0 9 8 0 - 3 7 5 - 9
Arctic Voi c es
Imagi n i ng Pa radi s e
Subhankar Banerjee
Barry Gifford
Resistance at the Tipping Point
A
pristine environment of ecological richness and biodiversity. Home to generations of indigenous people for thousands of years. The location of vast quantities of oil, natural gas, and coal. Largely uninhabited and long at the margins of global affairs, in the last decade Arctic Alaska has quickly become the most contested land in recent US history. World-renowned photographer, writer, and activist Subhankar Banerjee brings together first-person narratives from nearly thirty of the world’s most recognized activists, writers, and researchers who address issues of climate change, resource war, and human rights with stunning urgency and groundbreaking research. With contributions from Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, Michael Klare, Rebecca Solnit, and many more. “The Earth and her beings have been speaking. But we failed to listen. Arctic Voices compels us to listen. We will stay deaf at our peril.” —Vandana Shiva, founder of Navdanya and author of Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development
• Author talks in September in New York, Princeton, Seattle,
New and Selected Poems
I
n a world of poems as populous and diverse as it is ephemeral and evanescent, born of the world and of books and art in equal measure, the poet looks back, yielding granite truths and feather truths of people’s roller coaster lives. Published in The New Yorker, La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, and in nearly a hundred magazines and poetry journals from Los Angeles to Tokyo, from Lawrence, Kansas, to Rome, Madrid, Paris, Beijing, and Bucharest, poems by Barry Gifford have been describing and changing our world for nearly half a century. Here in one volume for the first time are the poet’s own choices from his nine previous collections, as well as a rich selection of new poems. Imagining Paradise sums up the tremendous achievement of an undergound poet who endured. “Barry Gifford’s pure lyrical self shines in these poems.” —Andrei Codrescu “[Gifford’s] poems remind me of Frank O’Hara’s phrase ‘feminine, marvelous and tough.’” —David Bromige
Bellingham, WA, and Philadelphia at the Academy of Arts and Sciences
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recently published / 49
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