November 17
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:
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!
September 07
To usher in back-to-school season, we've put up a free e-book of Robert Graves's witty, unorthodox writing handbook, The Reader Over Your Shoulder. The promotion lasts through September 11, 5PM EST.
Here on the blog, you can find an excerpt from the first chapter, "The Peculiar Qualities of English." Scholarly and thorough, but never pedantic or doctrinaire, the piece demonstrates why grammar maven Patricia T. O'Conner calls The Reader Over Your Shoulder "the best book on writing ever published."
November 16
A few years ago, I began losing many of the people I love. One of the difficult things about coming from a culture where your extended familia is considered your "nuclear" family is that you don't just lose a set of parents, a couple of aunts and uncles, but dozens upon dozens of tías, tíos, madrinas, padrinos, abuelitas, abuelitos. A whole flank of familia is suddenly gone.
My parents joined that clan exodus, dying within five months of each other. Actually, I had been losing both incrementally to Alzheimer's over several years. Each time I returned to the Dominican Republic to look after their care and visit with them, I'd braced myself for the day when they wouldn't know who I was. No matter how old you get, while your parents are living, you are still somebody's "child."
Their loss, though painful, was in the natural order of things. But then came a loss I was not expecting: my older sister committed suicide.
May 28
To celebrate Miles Davis's birthday this past Sunday, we're sharing an intimate conversation between Quincy Troupe, Miles's friend, biographer, and author of Miles and Me, and Seven Stories Publisher Dan Simon. Troupe dishes on the curious start to their friendship, the riotous energy of Miles's persona, and the deeply universal nature of his music. Our Spotify playlist at the end lets you groove to the rhythm of Troupe's favorite Davis tracks.
January 25
Introducing Three Cheers, a new series in which Seven Stories authors dish on three books that have inspired them over the course of their writing careers. In this installment, Barry Gifford, author of Wild at Heart and, most recently, The Cuban Club, dusts off some lesser known works of fiction for his three picks.
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.
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.
May 17
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!
December 14
A newsletter from our publisher.