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The Seven Stories fiction list began with Nelson Algren stories, with titles like "The Face on the Barroom Floor" and "The Lightless Room." These are not exactly beach reads, nor are the books you'll find below. What you will find are novels rooted in this world, presenting the dignity of people struggling to make sense of it and in one way or another to change it.

So, this is another kind of summer fiction list. We hope you'll find much that will challenge, inspire, and engage, in times of darkness and of light.

All titles 50% off for one week only, through June 14, 5:00PM EST.

"In just 96 pages, Luis Negrón is satirical, heartwarming, heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny. His collection of short fictional stories, Mundo Cruel, is gay fiction at its best." —The Daily Texan

These days, a lot of people are talking about Guernica, the online magazine of ideas, art, poetry, and fiction. They’ve published great writing from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Tariq Ali, Rivka Galchen, Jesse Ball, and Porochista Khakpour, to name an eclectic few. And they also put great work online and for free, providing a blueprint for how a great journal can thrive in the digital age.

What people may not know is that Guernica also publishes an annual book showcasing some of their best work. This year’s volume 2 includes:

Hankering for a new online lit blog to whet your insatiable appetite for thoughtful features, reviews of under-the-radar fiction, and interviews with young upstart scribblers? We thought you might be.

You heard that right—77% off all e-books from Seven Stories through May 15, 5PM EST. Check out some of our collections, including Fiction from around the World, Radical Women, Activist Diaries, and our For Young People series if you're looking for inspiration!

Happy Birthday to Octavia Butler, our favorite Gemini-Cancer cusp speculative fiction genius! For 24 hours only, we're offering 40% off both Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents exclusively on our site.

While reading through Kurt Vonnegut’s papers in the Lilly Library, at Indiana University, as they worked on the first comprehensive edition of his short fiction, Vonnegut’s friend Dan Wakefield and Jerome Klinkowitz, a scholar of Vonnegut’s work, came across five previously unpublished stories. 

In anticipation of publishing Kurt Vonnegut’s Complete Stories (available for order today!), we’ve been rolling out some of those tales that never found their way into print. The Atlantic got “The Drone King,” which they published along with an incredible animated version of the story. Another, “Requiem for Zeitgeist” will be published tomorrow on the website of The Nation.

And here’s "And on Your Left," a never before published Vonnegut story exclusively for the Seven Stories blog. It tells the tale of hard scientists forced into a life of show biz, and how they conspire to get back to their work. We hope you enjoy!

It's the book that predicted Trump, altered the course of speculative fiction, and helped to inspire Beyoncé's Lemonade. It's also a masterpiece in its own right. I'm talking about Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, which was published twenty-five years ago this week. To commemorate the date, you can read the first three chapters of the book here. And if you don't want to give your money to Amazon, you can buy the book direct from Seven Stories, at 25% off, with free shipping within the U.S. Enjoy!

Today we celebrate what would be the 71st birthday of the late Octavia Butler, a pioneer in the world of science fiction, with "The Book of Martha," a short story from Bloodchild.

In this story, Butler works through her lack of belief in the possibility of a universally appealing utopia with humor and careful consideration. God summons Martha Bes to effectively ameliorate the conditions of humanity. As a result of the exchange, Martha settles on an original plan to satisfy God's seemingly impossible challenge.

PS: Enter to win a free copy of Bloodchild here, and take 50% off Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents through Saturday June 23, 11:59 PM.

"They are making bourgeois garbage and I have been making revolutionary garbage." Thus quoth Jean-Luc Godard, about his former friends, the "bourgeois" filmmakers Truffaut and Coutard, in this 1970 interview with the Evergreen Review's Kent Carroll. It's a fascinating text, in which Godard, along with Jean-Pierre Gorin, his partner in the class-conscious Dziga-Vertov Group, discuss American students, revolutionary struggle, and "what the Chinese call a bullet wrapped in sugar." We hope you enjoy!

The JT LeRoy scandal is a story of our times. In January 2006, the New York Times unmasked Savannah Knoop as the face of the mysterious author JT LeRoy. A media frenzy ensued as JT’s fans, mentors, and readers came to terms with the fact that the gay-male-ex-truck-stop-prostitute-turned literary-wunderkind was really an invention of Knoop, who played the character of LeRoy, and Knoop's sister-in-law Laura Albert, who wrote the books.

Now Knoop's memoir of the experience, Girl Boy Girl, has been turned into a movie, JT LeRoy, starring Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern. To link up with the film, we're publishing a new edition of the book, with a brand new preface by Knoop, exclusively online here at the Seven Stories Blog. Click through to see!

This is the real gift of her work, a gift that shines in Bloodchild: in inviting her readers to engage with darker realities, to immerse themselves in worlds more disturbing and complex than our own, she asks readers to acknowledge the costs of our collective inaction, our collective bowing to depravity, to tribalism, to easy ignorance and violence. Her primary characters refuse all of that. Her primary characters refuse to deny the better aspects of their humanity. They insist on embracing tenderness and empathy, and in doing so, they invite readers to realize that we might do so as well. Butler makes hope possible.

Harriet Hyman Alonso, author of Martha and the Slave Catchers, a book for middle school readers, speaks with Catherine A. Franklin an education professor who created the Martha and the Slave Catchers curriculum guide. They discuss some of the aspects of Martha and the Slave Catchers that relate to history and teaching, William Llyod Garrison's unruly but ethical children, and some questions for today, including: "Who are the modern abolitionists?" and "How do we resist unfair laws?"

Ricardo Piglia, one of Argentina’s greatest writers, is dead. In 2013, we published Piglia’s afterword to Rodolfo Walsh’s Operation Massacre. It contains not only a penetrating analysis of Walsh’s book,