SEVEN STORIES PRESS UK – serie

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 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.

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.

Magisterial in scope and size, Annie Ernaux: Writing, The Other Life comprises twenty-four previously unpublished Ernaux pieces, as well as literary criticism, essays, interviews, diary entries, a song by Jeanne Cherhal, newspaper clippings, a comic strip by Aurelia Aurita, and letters from Simone de Beauvoir. Never before published in English, this beautifully visual collection includes an eight-page colour photo insert with images, handwritten manuscript pages, and drawings sprinkled throughout. It is the fruit of collaboration between six celebrated translators and a groundbreaking work of scholarship.

Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was 7 years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her and at 14 or 15 the abuse stopped. At 19, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather and Sinno started a new life in Mexico. Through the construction of a fragmented narrative, woven together with documents and thoughts like a peculiar personal investigation, Sinno explores the different facets of memory-her own, her mother's, as well as her abusive stepfather's; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. Her account is woven together with a close reading of literary works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes among others. Sad Tiger-the title inspired by William Blake's poem 'The Tyger'-is a literary exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. In this extraordinary book there is an abiding concern: how to protect others from what the author herself endured? In the midst of so much darkness, an answer reads crystal clear: by speaking up and asking questions. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece.

Darryl Cunningham's new graphic biography of Elon Musk is a riveting deep dive into the audacious mind and tumultuous journey of the world's richest man. Using his signature pictographic style-clean lines, vivid colours, and lean panel compositions-Cunningham peels back the layers of myth around Musk to deliver a timely portrait that is provocative and informative. Spanning several generations, the book traces Musk's journey from his family roots in South Africa and his grandfather's role in the Technocracy movement to his current position at the apex of tech power and far-right politics. From Musk's early education and influences, the creation of PayPal, and the meteoric rise of Tesla and SpaceX thanks to millions in government handouts, to his acquisition of X.com and his ascension as a 'dark MAGA' influencer and kingmaker, Elon Musk: American Oligarch captures the tension, tumult, and chaos in which oligarchs thrive today. Cunningham's award-winning clarity and style sparkle as he presents freewheeling financial and engineering concepts used by startups and tech companies. This fast-paced biography reveals the complex interactions of visionary ideas, relentless drive, and unyielding ambition. Elon Musk: American Oligarch offers a fresh, unvarnished look at Musk's rise, aggressive leadership style, and appetite for risk-taking that have propelled him into a unique position as an unelected private business owner with unprecedented access to political power.

Written in the form of a 19th-century notebook of ornithological observations, Field Notes from an Extinction follows the life and work of one Ignatius Green, a fictitious English scientist dispatched by the Royal Society to the remote island of Tor Mor off the northern Irish coast. Green, a widower, is single-minded and self-righteous, brilliant and bumbling. He is determined to set the scientific record straight on the mating rituals, feeding and care of hatchlings, and other minutiae he can gather about the Great Auk (pinguinus impennis). Green's world is shattered when his monthly goods delivery arrives ravaged by the local Irish townsmen. His fury at their impertinence is matched only by his dismay at finding a small child amid the shipment - dirty, abandoned, mute, and utterly feral and unmanageable. Worse, the locals are growing restless and hungry. And there is talk sweeping the land of a terrifying woman with unnatural power. Green fights for his survival against brigands and hunger and, most fearsome, the resolve of a fierce and angry child. And, perhaps, for a wider understanding of family amidst roiling societal unrest.

In 'Hotel Casanova', the title story of this collection, Ernaux describes a series of hotel-room trysts with a man who holds no interest for her other than sexually, just after her mother is admitted to hospital suffering from severe dementia. The story brilliantly captures the loss of sense of self, and at the same time the intense pleasure and pain that she experiences through a kind of cascade of alienation. Then, in 'Histories,' Ernaux recalls a time in her childhood when she was the older girl responsible for a younger neighbour, holding her hand and bringing her to school and then home again, and the feelings of loss that ensued when this ended. Another memory inhabits 'Returns', this time of her last visit to her mother at home, and how the collision of their two fragile emotional states plays out during the hours spent together, like a collision of the past and the future. These personal narratives are joined by more journalistic essays on such themes as the true relationship between literature and politics, discourses on Cesare Pavese and Pierre Bourdieu - both of whom were major influences on Ernaux, though in very different ways - travel journals of Moscow, Leningrad, Leipzig, and short personal essays on writing and other subjects. A mix of seemingly unrelated texts that comprise the song of a considered life.

More than a dialogue or a debate, these conversations between Ernaux and Lagrave touch on many subjects, from the feminist future to each woman's class histories as seen through the prism of the socio-historic transformations of the postwar period. One an author and the other a sociologist, their conversations go back and forth between lived experience and analysis, and a richness emerges of care and mutual respect and mutual recognition. Acknowledging a debt to Pierre Bourdieu and his concepts of class transfuge (defection), domination and distinction, a frescoe emerges of the last 70 years in France, including references to Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Aron, and Simone de Beauvoir. These conversations began as a round-table discussion on May 26, 2021. A follow-up conversation occurred on March 24, 2022. A Conversation amounts to an extraordinary expression in book form of solidarity and friendship between two legendary figures who rose above their working class origins while at the same time remaining true to them.

Sue, her husband, Luke, and their children, Caroline and Wheatley, present as a picture-perfect family living the American dream of ascendancy and affluence in their Brooklyn neighbourhood. They purchase a brownstone at auction on a coveted tree-lined street with the intention of renovating it and moving in. At once avoidant and consumed by the renovation, Sue is torn between her aspirations to have what those around her seem to possess - from her therapist, Diana, to her alluring, insufferable neighbour Chantal - and her urge to escape the grip of their influences. Sue's obsession and paranoia grow while the neighbourhood becomes a hotbed of pulsating antagonisms. It is only after moving in that Sue becomes aware of the mysterious deaths of the brownstone's former residents, a mother and daughter whose voices echo in the silence. The house begins manifesting disturbing signs, such as wounds that bleed, just as Caroline and Wheatley exhibit their own troubling symptoms. Sue's nightmares proliferate and a vacuous stupor overcomes the family as they struggle to settle into the rhythms of life in what should be their dream home. When information arises that threatens to devastate her family, Sue must finally confront the explosive charge of personal and social reality once laid bare. With exacting psychological detail and a trenchant atmosphere, Shelter Is Necessary for Existence is a darkly comic and piercing social critique that examines the troubling territory of awareness, the lengths some go to avoid it, and what must be confronted for change to occur.

On a farm in Tzaneen, an Afrikaner town in Limpopo, the northernmost province of South Africa, Maluka, a young Black security guard, steps into trouble with the family for whom he works. Set against the backdrop of a post-Mandela, multi-racial South Africa in the mid-1990s, this novel follows a range of characters whose different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds inform how they contend with the fallout of the tragedy and how it ripples down a generation. We meet Maluka's younger brother Solly, who searches for the truth of what happened; the farm's matron Sunette, who suffers at the hands of her violent husband; Maluka's beloved Cola, a young spiritualist, who is pregnant with his child; and many more memorable characters. As secrets and resentments come to light, relationships are put under pressure, illuminating the complex and simmering tensions that define this community. An exquisite and wide-ranging debut, We Belong to the Trees offers an utterly original vision of post-apartheid South Africa, one that grapples with the freedom from the old apartheid realities and the yet-unrealized promised land of self-empowerment and equity the nation had long yearned for. The effects of exploitation, poverty, racism, and greed converge in a small town to tell the tale of a nation still grappling with the wounds of a violent history that is more than a recent memory.