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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:

Remember when journalism and cultural criticism provided a valued, stable career—when writers could be paid to say what they please, free from editorial meddling from management, and be paid for it? Neither do we. (We're millenials here at the SSP blog.) But that doesn’t mean we can’t fight for journalists’ labor rights today and in the future.

There’s also the question of stakes. Even before Walsh knows the stakes of what he’s doing, he conveys a kind of urgency. His encounter with this unbearable situation comes across on the page. It’s so honest.

What supposedly thorny journalistic questions could be simply settled by honest, unbiased inquiry? Noam Chomsky asked that very question in 2002, in his speech "The Journalist from Mars," included in the second edition of Media Control: The Spectacular Achievments of Propaganda. Let's say an idealistic journalist came down from Mars, with none of the prejudices used by intellectual elites to buttress up power. What would that Martian make of global affairs and the way they're reported? How would our Martian friend report on terrorist acts in Nicaragua, Lebanon, the U.S., and elsewhere? Chomsky does his best Martian impression and informs us below.

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.

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.

by Paul Krassner

August 3rd, 2016 marked the 50th anniversary of groundbreaking comedian Lenny Bruce’s death from an overdose of morphine, while his New York obscenity conviction at Café Au Go Go was still on appeal. On that same day he received a foreclosure notice at his Los Angeles home.
But it wasn’t a suicide. In the kitchen, a kettle of water was still boiling, and in his office, the electric typewriter was still humming. He had stopped typing in mid-word: “Conspiracy to interfere with the 4th Amendment const”…constitutes what, I wondered.

Fake news have been in the news a lot lately. Whether we're talking about Trump's characterization of Russian meddling in the election or news feed headlines that put the National Review to shame, the impartiality and veracity of the media we consume is suddenly an open question. It didn't always used to be that way. At least not with the staid and storied New York Times.

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!

Entrapment had made the day’s events, and my own life, seem like legitimate literary subjects. The characters in its pages were called Frank Mears, and Blackie Cavanaugh, and Little Lester, but when I read about them I felt I was reading about old friends. They were the kids I had played with in the abandoned lot behind my apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as a child; men I knocked around with on street corners, gyms, and bars; my old friend Bones, an alcoholic who looked after me when I became a bicycle messenger at seventeen, and then hung himself from a pipe running along the ceiling of his basement apartment.

There’s no greater chronicler of the despair and hysteria of America in the late twentieth century than Gary Indiana. A novelist, playwright, photographer, poet, and former art critic at the Village Voice, Indiana has set down a generation’s pathologies for posterity. Now, exclusively for the Seven Stories Blog, he takes on the case Jann Wenner, the impresario behind Rolling Stone. Check out Indiana’s review of Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine here!

Everyone’s got a different way of coping with the Trump presidency. Some resist, some make fun on the internets, some prefer to hide under the...

We invite you to read the first three chapters of Parable of the Sower from the newest edition, released February 2017. 

"If there is one thing scarier than a dystopian novel about the future, it's one written in the past that has already begun to come true." -- Gloria Steinem, Parable of the Sower Introduction