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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!

The JT LeRoy scandal is a story of our times. In January 2006, the New York Times unmasked Savannah Knoop as the face of the mysterious author JT LeRoy. A media frenzy ensued as JT’s fans, mentors, and readers came to terms with the fact that the gay-male-ex-truck-stop-prostitute-turned literary-wunderkind was really an invention of Knoop, who played the character of LeRoy, and Knoop's sister-in-law Laura Albert, who wrote the books.

Now Knoop's memoir of the experience, Girl Boy Girl, has been turned into a movie, JT LeRoy, starring Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern. To link up with the film, we're publishing a new edition of the book, with a brand new preface by Knoop, exclusively online here at the Seven Stories Blog. Click through to see!

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."

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.

"They are making bourgeois garbage and I have been making revolutionary garbage." Thus quoth Jean-Luc Godard, about his former friends, the "bourgeois" filmmakers Truffaut and Coutard, in this 1970 interview with the Evergreen Review's Kent Carroll. It's a fascinating text, in which Godard, along with Jean-Pierre Gorin, his partner in the class-conscious Dziga-Vertov Group, discuss American students, revolutionary struggle, and "what the Chinese call a bullet wrapped in sugar." We hope you enjoy!

"But the bohemian narrative needed tweaking, as the old East Village went on dying. So I fudged together a grandiose tale of survival. I was the Last of the Mohicans, I told myself (“aha!”), citing the opening on Avenue A of the gourmet delicatessen Gracefully in 1999 as proof that our values were under attack by capitalism. I, descendant of Richard Hell, was to hold a valiant last stand before the neighborhood surrendered its anarcho-populism to commercial hegemony. Then, having decided my time was up, I would flee to the Upper East Side (I did just that), now the token artist moonlighting as an ironic has-been, raconteur to starchy lawyers and doctors. I would tell myself and everyone else that I’d been part of something real, something raw, something so unlike the preppy invasion, something no algorithm could ever predict, something unannounced."

Carlos Dengler writes about gentrification, social conscience, and more.

You may have heard of the Epic of Gilgamesh, but have heard of the graphic novel of the Epic of Gilgamesh? And did you know that it's actually the most up-to-date English version of the ancient text, based on new translations from a recently discovered tablet? If you didn't, now you do! And here in "The Making of the Dixon Gilgamesh" you can learn even more. Kent H. Dixon, one half of the father-son team behind this ingenious work, talks about taking courses in Akkadian by mail, becoming a "monster of memory," and the prudery of an esteemed old translator who couldn't bear to render sex scenes in anything but Latin. Enjoy! 

We're proud to announce that Robin Marty's Handbook for a Post-Roe America is out this week. Handbook is a comprehensive and user-friendly manual for understanding and preparing for the looming changes to reproductive rights law, and getting the healthcare you need––by any means necessary. Read about how we got to the situation we're in, and about some possibilities for the future of abortion access, after the jump.

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. 

As the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots approaches, it is important to honor the stories of those in pursuit of justice and acceptance for the LGBT+ community. Originally translated and published in 2009, Seba al-Herz's pseudonymously written The Others is one such story, detailing a nameless woman's discovery of her own sexual orientation within a repressive community in Saudi Arabia. The following excerpt from the 2010 Stonewall Book Award nominee illustrates the powerful, yet tortuous intersection between love, faith, and identity.

In this excerpt from The America Syndrome: Apocalypse, War, and Our Call to Greatness, new in paperback this autumn, Betsy Hartmann discusses what has come to be called "the greening of hate"—that is, the fusion of environmentalism with anti-immigrant bigotry, an ideology which was shared by both the Christchurch and El Paso gunmen. She also touches on modern eugenics in the U.S., and stresses the need to avoid simple dualities in discussing questions of population and environment.