October 16
Excerpted from Paul Auster's A Life in Words: Conversations with I. B. Siegumfeldt, available for purchase from our site at 25% off list price.
In the conversation below, acclaimed novelist Paul Auster and scholar I. B. Siegumfeldt discuss Auster's "Portrait of an Invisible Man," which comprises one half of The Invention of Solitude and served as the pivotal piece of writing for Auster's movement into a style wholly his own. Auster discusses the hazards of literary education ("I’d come to such a point of self-consciousness that I somehow believed that every novel had to be completely worked out in advance"); the death of his father ("My father came from the generation of men who wore neckties, and apparently he kept every tie he ever owned. When he died, there must have been a hundred of them in his closet. You are confronted by these ties, which are, in a sense, a miniature history of his life."); and the vitality of the unconscious ("I understood that everything comes from within and moves out. It’s never the reverse. Form doesn’t precede content. The material itself will find its own form as you’re working through it."). We hope you enjoy!
February 22
What does it mean to have, or to love, a black body? Taking on the challenge of interpreting the black body's dramatic role in American culture, Nana-Ama Danquah's anthology The Black Body asks thirty black, white, and biracial contributors—award-winning actors, artists, writers, and comedians—including voices as varied as President Obama's inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander, actor and bestselling author Hill Harper, and former Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts.
As part of our celebration of Black History Month, we're publishing Danquah's introduction to The Black Body here on the blog. It's a wise and thoughtful piece that delves into complex questions of bodies, blackness, and perception. We hope you'll enjoy.
July 16
Yesterday the the New York Times ran a feature implying there are no major health risks associated with the upcoming move to 5G cellular networks. The piece did make a convincing case that an often reproduced graph on the dangers of cell phones, first created by a Dr. Bill P. Curry in 2000, contains a serious error. But the dangers of electromagnetic fields (EMF) are broader than the article mentions, and the effects have by no means been exhaustively studied. As a primer to the subject, here is the first chapter of Martin Blank's Overpowered: What Science Tells Us About the Dangers of Cell Phones and Other WiFi-Age Devices.
May 29
"I grew up in the colonies and I may not have learned politically correct English, but I did learn that imperialism always comes bearing the best intentions. It kindly enlightens the benighted, as it offers to cure their frustrations. But to be cured, savages must first mime the idiocies of their conquerors: trade when they trade, pray where they pray."
March 28
Happy birthday to Nelson Algren, one of Seven Stories's founding authors and patron saints. Algren was the first ever National Book Award winner, the one-time lover of Simone de Beauvoir, and an inspiration to artists as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut and Donald Barthelme, Studs Turkel and Lou Reed. But Algren was much more than his accolades and could ever show, as the following excerpt from his Noncomformity: Writing on Writing will attest. Beginning with an epigraph from F. Scott Fitzgerald in his 'crack-up' years, Algren's essay is, in some ways, the opposite of inspiring. It is a look into the depths of the writer's motivation (hint: vindictiveness), and a hymn to all those who "live underground." Perhaps enjoy is not the world—but we hope you'll find yourself moved and provoked by this lyrical and brilliant piece of writing on writing.
December 22
The Christmas season is here and for those of you with a millennial wo/man child or actual child in your life that may very well mean buying video games. I’m not going to help you pick out a game, we sell books here, maybe later we’ll help you pick out a book. If you’re interested in some best of 2016 video game lists check with these people. They’ll tell you what to buy the millennial wo/man child in your life.
This post is shameless log rolling for State Of Play, a collection of essays by some of the most insightful game commentators and journalists we could find.
December 20
by Derrick Jensen
When I find myself in times of trouble, I’m less interested in Mother Mary’s wisdom than I am in Joe Hill’s: Don’t mourn; organize.
There’s a sense in which Trump’s election is a surprise, similar to how we somehow seem to be continually surprised when easily predictable negative consequences of this way of life come to pass. So we’re surprised when bathing the world in insecticides somehow causes crashes in insect populations, when covering the world in endocrine disrupters somehow leads to the disruption of endocrine systems