Seven Stories Press Ltd – förlag

A collaboration of activists, artists, journalists, and academics working together to depict the historic uprising - with comics that show what would be censored in photos and film in Iran - in solidarity with the Iranian people, in defence of feminism. On September 13th 2022, a young Iranian student, Mahsa Amini, was arrested by the religious police in Tehran. Her only crime was that she wasn't properly wearing the headscarf required for women by the Islamic Republic. At the police station, she was beaten so badly she had to be taken to the hospital, where she fell into a deep coma. She died three days later. The plight of this 22-year-old woman raised a wave of protests that soon spread through the whole country, and crowds adopted the slogan 'Woman, Life, Freedom.' Around the world, these words have been chanted during solidarity rallies. In this powerful visual collection of graphic novel style essays, Marjane Satrapi has gathered together intense narration by herself and an array of journalists and writers with graphic art perspectives from esteemed collaborators including Coco, a press cartoonist at Charlie Hebdo; Patricia Bolanos, a Spanish illustrator based in Brooklyn; Mana Neyestani, an Iranian cartoonist and illustrator; and Paco Roca, a Spanish comic book artist, Shabnam Adiban, an Iranian illustrator based in Toronto, among others. Together, these are the artists and story-tellers Marjane Satrapi has chosen to tell the story of a major revolution happening in her homeland of Iran today that has inspired support from around the world. Woman, Life, Freedom includes: Full colour art that bears witness and provides context for this major event for Iran and for all women from 18 exceptional graphic artists. Perspectives on Iran from three experts - long-time journalist for Liberation and political scientist Jean-Pierre Perrin; researcher and Iran specialist Farid Vahid; and UC Berkley historian Abbas Milani, Director of the Iranian Studies programme at Stanford University. Hand-drawn art and writing from activists, artists, journalists, and academics, collaborating from around the world in support of the cause. WOMAN, LIFE, FREEDOM demonstrates that this is not an unexpected movement, but a major uprising in a long history of women who have wanted to affirm their rights. It will continue. Contributing artists, including four Iranians. Joann Sfar, Coco, Mana Neyastani, Catel, Pascal Rabate, Patricia Bolanos, Paco Roca, Bahareh Akrami, Hippolyte, Shabnam Adiban, Lewis Trondheim, Winshluss, Touka Neyastani, Bee, Deloupy, Nicolar Wild, Hamoun. (Two artists have taken a pen name, Bee and Hamoun.)

In a desert dotted with war-torn towns, Lazaro and Juan are two soldiers from opposing camps who abandon the war and, while fleeing, become lovers and discover a dark truth. Vicente Barrera, a salesman who swept into the lives of women who both hated and revered him, spends his last days tied up like a mad dog. A morgue worker, Salvador, gets lost in the desert and mistakes the cactus for the person he loves. Over the echoes of the stories of these broken men - and of their mothers, lovers and companions - Mendoza explores her characters' passions in a way that simmers on the page, and then explodes with pain, fear and desire in a landscape that imprisons them. After winning the International Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Poetry Prize, Clyo Mendoza has written a novel of extraordinary beauty where language embarks on a hallucinatory trip through eroticism, the transitions of conscience, and the possibility of multiple beings inhabiting a single body. In this journey through madness incest, sexual abuse, infidelity, and silence, Fury offers a moving questioning of the complexity of love and suffering. The desert is where these characters' destinies become intertwined, where their wounds are inherited and bled dry. Readers will be blown away by the sensitivity of the writing, and will shudder at the way violence conveyed with a poetic forcefulness and a fierce mastery of the Mexican oral tradition.

Silencio tells the story of Agueda, a young woman mourning the death of her mother. When the townspeople deny her a grave in the local cemetery, the mother's body vanishes. Agueda knows her father is hiding it, and when she confronts him, he punishes her defiance with confinement. Serving her sentence in a house, Agueda lives within those walls as if in a second maternal womb one that will transform her. In chapters alternating between the real and the imaginary, she mourns the destroyed futures of those who were silenced as she listens to her neighbours' stories of loss - a child worker; a boy from the Tacuate community; and Mexican refugees in Canada. Through the walls, she senses the world: birds in dialogue, the beauty of the arid landscape, experiences of love and devastation. She comes to realize that in this mountain region that resembles the author's hometown of Oaxaca, where organized crime holds sway, many - like her - mourn their dead and search for the disappeared. In her second book to be translated into English, Clyo Mendoza transcends the limits of language and realism to represent with lyric brutality the unspeakable violence in towns where narcotrafficking rules.

Nora Lange's debut novel, Us Fools, was praised as the 'Great American Novel' by Molly Young in The New York Times, and 'a razor-sharp critique of American capitalism' by Michael Schaub at NPR. Now, she turns her eye toward the daily exercise of getting by. In 'Heart Beats', Carol and David arrive late to a Boston dinner party for a night of 'messy socialising' with other couples, including a former cult-leader turned financial-advisor and a woman who learned of a 'kinky sort of game' while riding public transit, details that she will reveal after the peach crumble. In 'Island of Phaetons', an expatriate living in Istanbul is called away from her daily life with 'the husband' and 'the friend who wanted more than friendship' to visit her mother, who notoriously makes bad decisions, and who has just arrived in Greece 'with news' for her daughter, a tantalising invitation that has her daughter immediately on a plane. In 'Dog Star', two figurines live out their dreams before succumbing to the truth that they have been assembled inside of a snow globe and will never go anywhere. In the title story, a new mother in Los Angeles navigates a job, a long-distance relationship with her husband, and her visiting mother, while hoping to find relief in daytime app sex. These stories of lust, estrangement, and self-preservation are at once hilarious and savage.

Emma-Jade and Louis are born into the havoc of the Vietnam War. Orphaned, saved and cared for by adults coping with the chaos of Saigon in free-fall, they become children of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through the linked destinies of characters connected by birth and destiny, the novel zigzags between the rubber plantations of Indochina; daily life in Saigon during the war as people find ways to survive and help each other; Operation Babylift, which evacuated thousands of biracial orphans from Saigon in April 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War; and today's global nail polish and nail salon industry, largely driven by former Vietnamese refugees - and everything in between.

This is a story of hidden gay and trans relationships, the effects of a near-fatal accident, and an oppressed childhood, where Ivana Bodrozic tackles the issues addressed in her previous works - issues of otherness, identity and gender, pain and guilt, injustice and violence. A daughter is paralyzed after a car crash, left without the ability to speak, trapped in a hospital bed, unable to move anything but her eyes. Although she is immobilized, her mind reels, moving through time, her memories a salve and a burden. A son is stuck in a body that he doesn't feel is his own. He endures misperceptions and abuse on the way to becoming who he truly is. A mother who grew up being told she was never good enough, in a world with no place for the desires and choices of women. She carries with her the burden of generations. These three stories run parallel and intertwine. Three voices deepen and give perspective to one another's truth, pain, and struggle to survive.

In late 1936, eighteen-year-old Isidro Elejalde leaves his Basque village in northern Spain, spurred by the rousing words of a political essayist to join the fight to preserve his country's democracy from insurrectionists. Months earlier, Spanish generals had launched a military coup to overthrow Spain's newly elected left-wing government. The generals assumed the population would welcome the coup, but throughout the country citizens such as Isidro remained loyal to the ideals of democracy, and the Spanish Civil War began in bloody earnest. In Bilbao, Mariana raising her two young children while, through her writing, she decries the fascist-backed coup attempt and its German and Italian allies, imploring the world to support democracy. As the Nationalist forces assault the country, Mariana and Isidro's lives intersect fleetingly, yet in meaningful and lasting ways. What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is a remarkable feat of research and imagination, as well as a transcendent literary accomplishment.

In Ordinary People Don't Carry Machine Guns, Artem Chapeye reveals his war, intimate and senseless, withholding nothing about his motivations, his nightmares, his new relationship with the world. Here one man, a pacifist turned fighter, a story writer turned soldier considers the reasons for and reactions to war on a very personal level. Chapeye investigates his role in the Ukrainian people's defense against the Russian army and his responsibilities as a father, a writer, a soldier, and a man of conviction. An avowed pacifist until 2022, Chapeye joined the Ukrainian army in the first days of the invasion. He tries to understand the large-scale decision-making that has a defining impact on both individual citizens and society-at-large: many of his fellow soldiers never considered enlisting before finding themselves at war; others fled the country. He wonders what his young children at home are doing and what they're feeling. The book has three parts, offering historical analogies and literary references throughout. 'When Darkness Comes' relates the first days of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 when lives and the peace were shattered. 'It's Necessary to Cultivate Your Garden' details the experience of the everyday people of Ukraine, workers and peasants, who look forward to returning to simpler lives. The last section, 'People Aren't Divided into Brands,' critiques the elitism of those who consider themselves above those who 'simply' fight. Deeply thought-provoking, intelligent, and heartbreaking, this is an essential book for anyone who wants to understand the ways that war can change everything.

The Arabic word sumud is often loosely translated as 'steadfastness' or 'standing fast.' It is, above all, a Palestinian cultural value of everyday perseverance in the face of Israeli occupation. Sumud is both a personal and collective commitment; people determine their own lives, despite the environment of constant oppressions imposed upon them. This anthology spans the 20th and 21st centuries of Palestinian cultural history, and highlights writing from 2021-2024. The collection of writing and art features work from forty-six contributors including: Dispatches from Hossam Madhoun, co-founder of Gaza's Theatre for Everybody, as he survives the post-October 2023 war on Gaza; novelist Ahmed Masoud with 'Application 39,' a sci-fi short story about a Dystopian bid for the Olympics; Sara Roy and Ivar Ekeland with 'The New Politics of Exclusion: Gaza as Prologue,' an analysis of Israel's divide and conquer policies of fragmentation; historian Ilan Pappe with a review of Tahrir Hamdi's book, Imagining Palestine, in which he unpacks the relationship between culture and resistance; essayist Lina Mounzer with 'Palestine and the Unspeakable,' an offering on the language used to dehumanize Palestinians; and poetry by the next generation of poets who have inherited the mantle of the late Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008). The essays, stories, poetry, art and personal narrative collected in Sumud: A New Palestinian Reader is a rich riposte to those who would denigrate Palestinians' aspirations for a homeland. It also serves as a timely reminder of culture's power and importance during occupation and war.

The Croatian city of Vukovar was the site of some of the worst violence in ex-Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Nora is a journalist assigned to do a puff piece on the perpetrator of a crime of passion - a Croatian high school teacher who fell in love with one of her students, a Serb, and is now in prison for having murdered her husband. But Nora herself is the daughter of a man who was murdered years earlier under mysterious circumstances. And she wants, if not to avenge her father, at least to bring to justice whoever committed the crime. An exciting literary thriller from one of Europe's most celebrated young authors.

Eye of the Monkey begins in the wake of a devastating civil war that led to the formation of the United Regency, an autocracy in an unnamed European country. The ravages of war are sweeping, and the populace has been divided into segregated zones, where the well-off are under mass surveillance and the poor are phantom presences, confined and ghettoised. On the verge of a nervous breakdown after being stalked for weeks by a young man, Giselle, a history professor at the New University, seeks the help of Dr. Mihaly Kreutzer, a psychiatrist who is navigating divorce and the recent death of his mother. They soon begin a torrid love affair, but everything is not what it seems. As Giselle begins to unpack her family history and the possible root of her psychological crisis, Dr. Kreutzer, who has ties to some of the most powerful people in the country, possesses ulterior motives of his own. In Toth's deftly woven, dystopian, and polyphonic novel - full of twists, turns, and treachery - we plumb the depths of a fractured, disturbed, and isolated society, as well as the underbelly of social perversions such a society produces.

A group of entrepreneurs brings roaring back to life a defunct turbine factory and the town around it, promising a return to the days of dignity, jobs and the good life and bright future that a manufacturing centre can dispense to a small town. But is a return to the days of plenty possible? And what of the changed relationships between lovers, and within families, that have transpired in the years since that earlier time?

Two stories converge in the aftermath of the devastating 1908 earthquake in Sicily and Calabria: a young woman sees a chance to avoid her impending arranged marriage and a boy manages to escape from the influence of an abusive mother on the verge of madness. This new award-winning novel is from Nadia Terranova, author of Farewell Ghosts, a finalist for the 2019 Premio Strega, and is translated by Ann Goldstein, who also was the translator of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet. 'There is something stronger than pain, and that is habit.' Eleven-year-old Nicola knows this well. Each night he is tied up in the cellar by his mother, the wife of Calabria's biggest bergamot producer. There he waits for the sun to rise, and with it a sliver of freedom. On the other side of the sea, Barbara has just arrived in Messina and plans to escape her father, who pulls her towards marriage with a man she does not love. Liberty will be granted to both, but it will come at a very high price. On December 28th, 1908, the earth shakes. Europe's most devastating earthquake razes the cities of Messina and Reggio Calabria and, along with them, everything Nicola and Barbara have known. From the ruins, each must piece back together a life and start anew. Written in Nadia Terranova's distinctively lyric style, The Night Trembles is a melancholic ode to human resilience and the promise of the unknown.

After a young couple return from their summer in the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine, they discover that the world as they once knew it no longer exists. Survivors are forced to adapt to the harsh conditions of their new reality: a place where erosion floats in on a breeze and ceasing to exist comes with a deceptively joyous capitulation. Overcoming deeply rooted fears, they try to forge another world, uniting with those who continue to fight the darker urges that can emerge when a society must rebuild. Will the couple be able to survive, make alliances with others, and give birth to a new generation? Will the insidiousness of human nature manifest itself in this new, post-apocalyptic world? Filled with beautifully melancholic and black humour, The Weathering becomes a kind of study of behaviour in critical situations when everything that once seemed stable falls apart.

When Tymofiy is five years old, his small family in Cherkasy, Ukraine grows by one. Not with the birth of a baby sister or brother, but with the appearance of Felix - mentor and tormentor, enemy and friend - Tymofiy's grandmother's sometime-boyfriend. 'Who are you?' Felix screams in the depths of a confused and drunken rage at all who cross his path, his memories of the Soviet-Afghan war clouding his eyes and senses. 'Who are you?' Tymofiy asks himself as he drifts through the streets of his hometown, searching for love and protection, for a better, happier way of life. A gritty, realist depiction of Ukraine and the post Soviet world, this book offers an affecting yet honest look into the life of someone suffering from PTSD. It is a story of growing up without much hope for a better future, and yet intense moments of connection and kindness persist. Just when things begin to seem insurmountably dark, a friendship begins, a kind word is said, or a hand reaches out and opens the curtains, letting in a little light.

1991. After fleeing the war zone of their small Croatian town, a mother and two children are housed, along with other displaced persons, at a former communist school in the village of Kumrovec. For years they share a single room, waiting to hear whether the narrator's father survived the war. In the meantime, life goes on for the teenage protagonist. First loves bloom and burn, new friendships are acquired and lost. But she never loses her shy, insightful voice, nor her self-deprecating sense of humor. Hotel Tito is a sensitive and forthright coming of age novel in a time of atrocity and loss.

Intricately woven masterpieces of craft, mournful for their human cries in defiance of our sometimes less than human surroundings, Nettel's stories and novels are dazzlingly enjoyable to read for their deep interest in human foibles. Following on the critical successes of her previous books, here are six stories that capture her unsettling, obsessive universe. Each narrative veers towards unknown and dark corridors, and the pleasures of these accounts lie partly in the great surprise of the familiarity together with the strangeness.

Ida is a married woman in her late thirties, who lives in Milan and works at a radio station. Her mother wants to renovate the family apartment in Messina, to put it up for sale and asks her daughter to sort through her things - to decide what to keep and what to throw away. Surrounded by the objects of her past, Ida is forced to deal with the trauma she experienced as a girl, twenty-three years earlier, when her father left one morning, never to return.

Farah moves into Liberty House at the tender age of thirteen, with her family. The commune's spiritual leader, Arcady, preaches equality, non-violence, anti-speciesism, free love and uninhibited desire for all, regardless of gender, age, looks or ability. In this utopian 'quiet zone,' far from access to technology, Farah goes through puberty as a transgender transition. Upon discovering they are intersex, Farah begins to question what it means to be a woman or a man, and all the principles those within and outside the confraternity live by and grows empowered to create a better world.

THE NIGHT is a political novel about the financial crisis and socio-political division in Venezuela from 2008 to 2010. The title of the book, originally also in English, is a gesture towards the failure of Chavism - the legacy of the Socialist and often controversial former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez - to resist US influence. Yet, the form is unapologetically literary, a reflection on the depiction and distortion of reality through storytelling. Recurring blackouts envelop Caracas in an inescapable darkness that makes nightmares come true. Real and fictional characters, most of whom are writers, play the role of narrator in this polyphonic novel. They recount contradictory versions of the plot, a series of femicides that began at the same time as the energy crisis. The central narrator is a psychiatrist who manipulates the accounts of his friend, an author writing a book titled The Night; and his patient, an advertising executive obsessed with understanding the world through word puzzles. The author shifts between crime fiction and metafiction, cautioning readers that the events retold are both true and manipulated.

A very short novel with the power and resonance of a much longer one, Anne-Marie la Beaute is a profound and moving act of remembrance, a clear-eyed assessment of the hard-edged nature of fame, a meditation on aging - and a wonderfully observant and comic exploration of human foibles. In short, another thought-provoking master class in how we perform life by the peerless Yasmina Reza.

This monumental novel tells the story of the Deliuskin family's secret interventions in music, mysticism and revolutionary thought over the course of three centuries, spanning six generations. Each figure engages in obsessive and absurd acts, which depending on who controls the narrative could be genius or madness, so often indistinguishable. Countless minor characters also appear, intersecting with these stories in a suggestion of infinite parallel narratives. The title predestines this philosophical, political, historical, literary, sentimental, erotic, religious, scientific and artistic book to evocative incompleteness.

Emilia Codrescu had been responsible for the burning and shredding of Romanian censors' notebooks, viewed as State secrets, but prior to fleeing the country in 1974 she had stolen one. Now, forty years later, she makes the notebook available to 'Liliana Corobca' for the newly instituted Museum of Communism The Censor's Notebook is a window into the intimate workings of censorship under communism, steeped in mystery and secrets and lies, confirming the power of literature to capture personal and political truths.

The protagonists of these seven stories are already defeated by their own messianism. They retrospectively recount the unjust circumstances that turned them into victims or criminals. The cast of antiheroes in Sacrifices includes a blind man, Tiresias, that seeks intimacy in a labyrinthic Mexico City; a dying pilot who finds solace reading Antoine de Saint-Exupery on a beach in Biarritz; and a taxidermist painter who predicts various Venezuelan massacres in his own Guernica. These revelatory short stories tread the line between surrealism and realism, proving that fiction is always political. Despite the international settings, Blanco Calderon's mythical characters are the product of a Venezuelan legacy of martyrs whose sacrifices failed to lead the country to democracy.

Whether he's describing Tracy Emin or Warhol, the films of Barbet Schroeder ('Schroeder is well aware that life is not a narrative; that we impose form on the movements of chance, contingency, and impulse....') or the installations of Barbara Kruger ('Kruger compresses the telling exchanges of lived experience that betray how skewed our lives are...'), Indiana is never just describing. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it's also political, plus it's a riot of fun on the page.

No one knows more than strippers about being looked at. In this anthology, twenty-three dancers whose careers span decades, geographies, and identities demand to be seen. Through stories from first nights on the job to the day they hung up their sky-high heels - or decided they never will - these writers offer glimpses into lives of camaraderie and celebration, joy, pride, despair, frustration, self-doubt, and fear.

The Ukraine is a collection of twenty-six pieces that deliberately blur the line between nonfiction and fiction, conjuring the essence of a beloved country through its tastes, smells, and sounds, its small towns and big cities, its people and their compassion and indifference, simplicities and complications. In the title story, Chapeye facetiously plays with the English misuse of the article 'the' in reference to Ukraine, capturing a country as perceived from the outside, by foreigners. That pseudo-kitsch, often historically shallow, and not-quite-real Ukraine resonates because of its highly engaging and brutally candid snapshots of ordinary lives and typical places. In 'One Soul per Home' an elderly woman laments that the men are dying and the young are leaving for the cities, changing the face of her small town; in 'The Unscrupulous Spirit of the provinces,' a couple of unspecified gender get stoned and go to church; and in 'False Premises,' a man romanticises his younger years working for a Soviet fishing fleet only to reconstruct his nostalgia in the face of Putin's Russia.