April 27
Check out the latest installment of Three Cheers, a series in which Seven Stories authors dish on three books or authors that have inspired them over the course of their lives. In this issue, Innosanto Nagara, author of A is for Activist and many others, showcases a diverse range of influences, from the Polish absurdist Jerzy Kosinski to a dissident poet/playwright much closer to home.
October 18
The Price of the Ticket
by Kia Corthron
Originally published in the July/August 2016 issue of The Dramatist
Three years ago I was standing in the lobby of a theater, the typical Broadway cluster-mob awaiting entrance, with more than half the horde African-American. This would be logical, as the show was the musical revue After Midnight, a refurbishing of a prior concert piece entitled Cotton Club Parade celebrating Ellington-era jazz and dance. Inside, my sister and I were led to our orchestra seats, and I looked around: not another black face in sight. It took me a moment to realize that The Mystery of the Vanishing Black Folks likely would have been quickly resolved had we moved up to the balconies. But from where I sat, observing the complexion of the performers versus that of the onlookers, it was the Cotton Club, the Colors entertaining the Caucasians, and that the upper tiers may have been filled with black faces was not exactly comforting, an economically induced throwback to Jim Crow segregation with African Americans relegated to the peanut gallery.
July 05
Is Russian hacking really more significant than . . . the Republican campaign to destroy the conditions for organized social existence, in defiance of the entire world? Or to enhance the already dire threat of terminal nuclear war? Or even such real but lesser crimes such as the Republican initiative to deprive tens of millions of health care and to drive helpless people out of nursing homes in order to enrich their actual constituency of corporate power and wealth even further? Or to dismantle the limited regulatory system set up to mitigate the impact of the financial crisis that their favorites are likely to bring about once again? And on, and on.
October 06
The chapter below is excerpted from Khary Lazarre-White's Passage. As Farah Jasmine Griffin put it, Passage is "a work of great originality, pain, and aching beauty. Its protagonist, Warrior, a sensitive, haunted and haunting young man, bears the burden of history: the past is always near, shaping and informing present realities of black boys like himself."
January 16
Introducing a new feature on the Seven Stories blog: an indie bookstore round-up, in which staff and other members of our community write a few words on their other favorite independent bookstores. This week, Ben Hillin writes about Topos, in Ridgewood, Queens.
September 20
A newsletter from our publisher.
