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Works of Radical Imagination

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"summer-2016"

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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.

June 05

The Seven Stories fiction list began with Nelson Algren stories, with titles like "The Face on the Barroom Floor" and "The Lightless Room." These are not exactly beach reads, nor are the books you'll find below. What you will find are novels rooted in this world, presenting the dignity of people struggling to make sense of it and in one way or another to change it.

So, this is another kind of summer fiction list. We hope you'll find much that will challenge, inspire, and engage, in times of darkness and of light.

All titles 50% off for one week only, through June 14, 5:00PM EST.

July 31

A newsletter from our publisher.

April 06

The refrain we hear over and over, in the United States at least, is that people today are apathetic about politics. Yet it turns out that this is far from the case. Voters in the U.S. and in democracies around the world are more engaged in politics than they've ever been. The catch is that they're disillusioned with the democratic process itself. Only 33% of Europeans have faith in the EU. The U.S. Congress has a 69% negative rating. So what gives? In Against Elections, set to be published on April 17th, David Van Reybrouck diagnoses the symptoms of our ailing democracies and comes up with a radical solution: drawing lots, rather than voting, to determine our politicians, just as the ancient Athenians did. Here as an exclusive excerpt on the Seven Stories Blog is the book's introduction, from former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, and the first chapter of Van Reybrouck's book. 

March 31

August 15

November 30

If the Cultural Purity Police (CPP) had their way, they would brand British curry as theft, but every cuisine consists of an infinite number of borrowings and travels, sometimes stretching back millennia. . . . The idea of cultural purity now determines what representations we might safely consume without guilt. . . . [T]he loss is ours, doomed as we are to sterile images that question and probe nothing, offering only vast oceans of purity . . . .

January 05

Today we mourn the passing of the masterful and elusive novelist Aharon Appelfeld.

March 30

March 19