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On January 15th, we're releasing Barry Gifford's Southern Nights, a collection of three previously published novels, Night People, Arise & Walk, and Baby Cat-Face. It's an odd, hilarious, and touching trilogy. As Alan Cheuse of NPR puts it, "Gifford's night people are pure American . . . pure in their madness . . . in their evil . . . and to read about . . . pure pleasure." Filmmaker David Lynch puts it in his own way: In Gifford's world, "[i]t's wild and free and there's a kind of fearlessness, yet there's also some kind of deep understanding of life." Here exclusive to the Seven Stories Blog is the first chapter from the first book of the trilogy, Night People.

Back in the spring of 2016, an intrepid ACLU voting rights expert in California named Lori Shellenberger was able to help inform state legislators of the dangers of a new computer program against voter fraud called Interstate Crosscheck. The program claimed to identify people who were voting in more than one state. What it really did was remove hundreds of thousands of mostly minority voters from the rolls.

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.

“If there is no struggle there is no progress. . . . This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.”

—Frederick Douglass

Some October recommendations from the staff at Seven Stories Press.