Search results

Harriet Hyman Alonso, author of Martha and the Slave Catchers, a book for middle school readers, speaks with Catherine A. Franklin an education professor who created the Martha and the Slave Catchers curriculum guide. They discuss some of the aspects of Martha and the Slave Catchers that relate to history and teaching, William Llyod Garrison's unruly but ethical children, and some questions for today, including: "Who are the modern abolitionists?" and "How do we resist unfair laws?"

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."

This is the real gift of her work, a gift that shines in Bloodchild: in inviting her readers to engage with darker realities, to immerse themselves in worlds more disturbing and complex than our own, she asks readers to acknowledge the costs of our collective inaction, our collective bowing to depravity, to tribalism, to easy ignorance and violence. Her primary characters refuse all of that. Her primary characters refuse to deny the better aspects of their humanity. They insist on embracing tenderness and empathy, and in doing so, they invite readers to realize that we might do so as well. Butler makes hope possible.

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."

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!

At Seven Stories and at our children’s imprint, Triangle Square, we believe in talking *up* to young readers, not down to them. That’s why you’ll always find works on our children’s list that both challenge and inspire. 

In a year or two everyone would start dying of AIDS. But we didn’t know that in his office. What we knew was silence, elaborate and subtle and vast. What I knew was an avalanche of shame.