38 Books Published by Seven Stories Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage
Aimé Césaire: No to Humiliation
by NIMRODTriangle Square (Jan 16, 2024)
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The only young adult book to tell the story of Aimé Césaire, the rise of Negritude, and the crusade for Black African and Caribbean independence from colonial rule.
Aimé Césaire was a poet and, later, a politician from the Caribbean island of Martinique, who spoke out against the sufferings and humiliations endured by the peoples of the former French colonies. In Aimé Césaire: No to Humiliation, we are with Césaire in 1930s Paris. The young Martinican poet and his friends Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Gontran Damas are launching the Negritude movement. Together, they celebrate their Black African roots, protesting French colonial rule and policies of assimilation. They invite West Indians, Senegalese, Guyanese, and others to reject the suffocating French colonial presence and to take pride in their accents, their cultures and their shared histories.
Aimé’s great book-length poem, Notebook on the Return to the Native Land, and other works, are a global inspiration. His speeches enliven the crowds back home in Martinique, and he rises in the political arena, defending Martinican identity. As a writer, as the Mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy of the French National Congress, Aimé Césaire continues to write and to fight against colonial power and for the dignity of Black peoples everywhere.
Breaking the Chains: African-American Slave Resistance
by William L. KatzTriangle Square (May 16, 2023)
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Centering Black voices and slave narratives, this illustrated young adult history offers a thoroughly researched account with first-hand testimonies of how slaves themselves were a driving force behind their own emancipation. With a new introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley.
Generations of American history students have grown up believing that enslaved people accepted their lot and became attached to their masters, that slave rebellion was rare, and that liberation from slavery happened thanks to the enslavers.
Centering Black voices and slave narratives, celebrated historian and children’s book author, William Loren Katz offers a thoroughly researched look at the lives of enslaved people in the United States in Breaking the Chains. From their African abductions through their brave resistance to and escape from the ships and harsh plantation life to their roles in the Civil War, those given voice here show that the slaves themselves were a driving force behind their emancipation.
Little Black Lives Matter
by Khodi DillTriangle Square (Jan 10, 2023)
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An inspiring, life-affirming debut activist book in rhyming couplets and triplets about Black heroes for little ones, their families, and anyone who loves A is for Activist and Antiracist Baby.
Little Black Lives Matter empowers all children, but Black children especially, by affirming that their lives, however little they may yet be, matter. Featuring fifteen great Black heroes of the past and the powerful words they spoke and actions they took, Little Black Lives Matter is a rhyming board book that incorporates memorable quotations and a reminder to little ones that each of these great people once lived a little Black life themselves. From Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X to other inspiring freedom fighters like Marsha P. Johnson, Fred Hampton, and Frederick Douglass, writers James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou, musical artists Billie Holiday and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, athletes Wilma Rudolph, Jesse Owens, and Muhammad Ali, and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., this little book encourages young readers to find their inner heroes and see their own self-worth and agency through the acts of great Black heroes who came before them.
"let us look upon them and let us say their names,
And let us hear the mighty words they spoke to bring us change.
Audre Lorde lived a little Black life before she wrote to inspire
—"I am deliberate and afraid of nothing"—
to remind us of our inner power, and to share her poetic fire.
"So many who’ve lived these little black lives have mattered, so, you see,
But you needn’t change the world, my child, to mean the world to me.
A Young People’s History of the United States: Revised and Updated
by Howard ZinnTriangle Square (Oct 25, 2022)
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A Young People’s History of the United States brings to US history the viewpoints of workers, slaves, immigrants, women, Native Americans, and others whose stories, and their impact, are rarely included in books for young people.
Beginning with a look at Christopher Columbus’s arrival through the eyes of the Arawak Indians, then leading the reader through the struggles for workers’ rights, women’s rights, and civil rights during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ending with the current protests against continued American imperialism, Zinn presents a radical new way of understanding America’s history. In so doing, he reminds readers that America’s true greatness is shaped by our dissident voices, not our military generals.
A Young People’s History of the United States is also a companion volume to The People Speak, the film adapted from A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States.
Playtime for Restless Rascals
by Nikki GrimesTriangle Square (Sep 06, 2022)
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Nikki Grimes, Coretta Scott King Award winning author, and acclaimed illustrator Elizabeth Zunon’s latest children’s masterpiece is a whimsical adventure and rollicking celebration of playtime fun.
“Time to get to work, little one,” I tell you.
“What work?” you ask.
Like always,
you pretend not to understand.
“Your job is called Play,” I say.
Mom needs to wake up her child whose job is to play. From dancing in puddles to jumping in leaves, and swinging high enough to almost reach the sun, there’s so much to do in a fun-filled day.
For those seeking children’s books about diversity, this loving depiction of everyday shenanigans is sure to become a story time favorite. Playtime for Restless Rascals is an African American children’s book that celebrates imagination, playful moments, and the love between parents and child.
Moon and the Mars
by Kia CorthronSeven Stories Press (Aug 31, 2021)
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An exploration of NYC and America in the burgeoning moments before the start of the Civil War through the eyes of a young, biracial girl—the highly anticipated new novel from the winner of the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.
In Moon and the Mars, set in the impoverished Five Points district of New York City in the years 1857-1863, we experience neighborhood life through the eyes of Theo from childhood to adolescence, an orphan living between the homes of her Black and Irish grandmothers. Throughout her formative years, Theo witnesses everything from the creation of tap dance to P.T. Barnum’s sensationalist museum to the draft riots that tear NYC asunder, amidst the daily maelstrom of Five Points work, hardship, and camaraderie. Meanwhile, white America’s attitudes towards people of color and slavery are shifting—painfully, transformationally—as the nation divides and marches to war.
As with her first novel, The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, which was praised by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Angela Y. Davis, among many others, Corthron’s use of dialogue brings her characters to life in a way that only an award-winning playwright and scriptwriter can do. As Theo grows and attends school, her language and grammar change, as does her own vocabulary when she’s with her Black or Irish families. It’s an extraordinary feat and a revelation for the reader. “Moon and the Mars, [Corthron’s] latest masterpiece, is an absorbing story of family and community, of Africans and Irish, of settler and native, of slavery and abolition, of a city and a nation wracked by Civil War and racist violence, of love won and lost.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
Duende: Poems, 1966—Now
by Quincy TroupeSeven Stories Press (Aug 24, 2021)
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The selected poems from over fifty years by the great poet and biographer and friend of Miles Davis.
Quincy Troupe writes poetry in great waves. The words are just notes. It’s the music you make with them that matters. He’s not a wordsmith, he’s a shaman conjuring long repetitive lines, cadences of looking across the sea towards Africa and haunted by the legacy of slavery and racism, or of remembering fellow conjurers, poets and musical artists, celebrating, always celebrating, but never only that.
In the fifty-page, incantatory poem, Ghost Voices, there is a longing to be reconnected to the past, and a longing too to be free of it. In the short title poem, Duende:
For García Lorca and Miles Davis, there lies, nakedly, Troupe’s credo:
…secrets, mystery infused in black magic
that enters bodies in forms of music, art/ poetry imbuing language with sovereignty
in blood spooling back through violent centuries…
The version of the great poem Avalanche (number 3) that appears here is different from the version of the same poem he published nearly 25 years ago—in exactly the same way that a jazz artist picks up his horn to play the same song a little differently every time.
Troupe is a generous and gregarious poet in this giant offering that includes many new poems, as well as a selection chosen from across his eleven previously published volumes. What’s remarkable is the constancy, the energy, and how he’s always looking right at you in the here and now, and at the same time sees something over your shoulder that others don’t see yet, maybe a distant storm gathering over the waters, something we’re going to need to rise up and face soon enough.
Oh, the Things We’re For!
by Innosanto NagaraTriangle Square (Oct 06, 2020)
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A new book by the author of A is for Activist is a rhyming, boldly illustrated vision of a better world.
And raise your sign high
You’ll make people smile
who thought you were shy
And you’ll make people wonder, does that kid really know why?
You DO know of course
That’s why you are there
You’re there to say STOP!
What’s happening’s not fair
Then they say,
we know what you’re against
End poverty stop war…
But okay
then what are you for?
Oh! What are we for!
That’s my favorite question
And I’m sure it’s yours too
Because you pay attention
You have so many answers
And so many options
And so many solutions that you want to impart
The only hard question is where does one start? Oh, The Things We’re For! is a celebration of the better world that is not only possible, but is here today if we choose it. Today’s kids are well aware of the many challenges that they face in a world they are inheriting, from climate change to police violence, crowded classrooms to healthcare. Poetically written and beautifully illustrated in Innosanto Nagara’s (A is for Activist) signature style, this book offers a vision of where we could go—and a future worth fighting for. Oh, the Things We’re For! is a book for kids, and for the young at heart of all ages.
M Is for Movement
by Innosanto NagaraTriangle Square (Nov 05, 2019)
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Here is the story of a child born at the dawn of a social movement.
Parable of the Sower & Parable of the Talents Boxed Set
by Octavia ButlerSeven Stories Press (Oct 29, 2019)
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The African American Book Club will be moderating a discussion of Bulter’s Parable of the Talents on April 25, May 9, and May 30, 2023. Subscrbe to our newsletter to learn more.
A beautiful boxed set brings together the great sci-fi writer’s two award-winning Parable books
The perfect gift for fans of Octavia Butler, this boxed set pairs the bestselling Nebula-prize nominee, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, which together tell the near-future odyssey of Lauren Olamina, a hyperempathic young woman who is twice as feeling in a world that has become doubly dehumanized. In Sower, the place is California, where small walled communities protect from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of people addicts. Lauren sets off on foot along the dangerous coastal highways, moving north into the unknown. The book has an introduction by feminist, journalist, activist, and author Gloria Steinem.
Parable of the Talents celebrates the classic Butlerian themes of alienation and transcendence, violence and spirituality, slavery and freedom, separation and community, to astonishing effect, in the shockingly familiar, broken world of 2032. It is told in the voice of Lauren Olamina’s daughter—from whom she has been separated for most of the girl’s life—with sections in the form of Lauren’s journal. Against a background of a war-torn continent, and with a far-right religious crusader in the office of the U.S. presidency, this is a book about a society whose very fabric has been torn asunder, and where the basic physical and emotional needs of people seem almost impossible to meet. Talents is introduced by singer, musician, composer, producer, and curator Toshi Reagon, who created an opera based on the Parable books.
@aalbccom Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents #booktok #dystopianbooks #maga ? original sound - aalbc
The Huey P. Newton Reader, 2nd Edtion
by Huey P. NewtonSeven Stories Press (Feb 19, 2019)
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The first comprehensive collection of writings by the Black Panther Party founder and revolutionary icon of the black liberation era, now in a new edition with a new introduction by Elaine Brown.
The Huey P. Newton Reader combines now-classic texts from Newton’s books (Revolutionary Suicide, To Die for the People, In Search of Common Ground, and War Against the Panthers) ranging in topic from the formation of the Black Panthers, African Americans and armed self-defense, Eldridge Cleaver’s controversial expulsion from the Party, FBI infiltration of civil rights groups, the Vietnam War, and the burgeoning feminist movement. Editors Hilliard and Weise also include never-before-published writings from the Black Panther Party archives and Newton’s private collection, including articles on President Nixon, prison martyr George Jackson, Pan-Africanism, affirmative action, and the author’s only written account of his political exile in Cuba in the mid-1970s. Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Geronimo Pratt all came to international prominence through Newton’s groundbreaking political activism. Additionally, Newton served as the Party’s chief intellectual engine, conversing with world leaders such as Yasser Arafat, Chinese premier Chou Enlai, and Mozambique president Samora Moises Machel among others.
Beginning with his founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966, HUEY P. NEWTON (1941-89) set the political stage for events that would quickly place him and the Panthers at the forefront of the African American liberation movement for the next twenty years.
The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter
by Kia CorthronSeven Stories Press (Oct 17, 2017)
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Winner of the Center for Fiction’s 2016 First Novel Prize
The hotly anticipated first novel by lauded playwright and The Wire TV writer Kia Corthron, The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter sweeps American history from 1941 to the twenty-first century through the lives of four men—two white brothers from rural Alabama, and two black brothers from small-town Maryland—whose journey culminates in an explosive and devastating encounter between the two families.
On the eve of America’s entry into World War II, in a tiny Alabama town, two brothers come of age in the shadow of the local chapter of the Klan, where Randall—a brilliant eighth-grader and the son of a sawmill worker—begins teaching sign language to his eighteen-year-old deaf and uneducated brother B.J. Simultaneously, in small-town Maryland, the sons of a Pullman Porter—gifted six-year-old Eliot and his artistic twelve-year-old brother Dwight—grow up navigating a world expanded both by a visit from civil and labor rights activist A. Philip Randolph and by the legacy of a lynched great-aunt.
The four mature into men, directly confronting the fierce resistance to the early civil rights movement, and are all ultimately uprooted. Corthron’s ear for dialogue, honed from years of theater work, brings to life all the major concerns and movements of America’s past century through the organic growth of her marginalized characters, and embraces a quiet beauty in their everyday existences.
Sharing a cultural and literary heritage with the work of Toni Morrison, Alex Haley, and Edward P. Jones, Kia Corthron’s The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter is a monumental epic deftly bridging the political and the poetic, and wrought by one of America’s most recently recognized treasures.
The Wedding Portrait
by Innosanto NagaraTriangle Square (Oct 10, 2017)
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The Wedding Portrait is an essential book for kids about standing up for what’s right. Here are stories of direct action from around the world that are bookended by the author’s wedding story. He and his bride led their wedding party to a protest, and were captured in a photo by the local newspaper kissing in front of a line of police just before being arrested. "We usually follow the rules. But sometimes, if you see something is wrong—more wrong than breaking the rules and by breaking the rules you might stop it—you may need to break the rules." When indigenous people in Colombia block an oil company from destroying their environment—this is a blockade; when Florida farmworkers encourage people not to buy their tomatos because the farm owners won’t pay them for their hard work—this is called a boycott; and when Claudette Colvin takes a seat in the front of the bus to protest racism—this is called civil disobedience. In brilliantly bright and inspiring illustrations we see ordinary people say No—to unfair treatment, to war, to destroying the environment. Innosanto Nagara has beautifully melded an act of love with crucial ideas of civil disobedience and direct action that will speak to young readers’ sense of right and wrong. There has never been a more important moment for Innosanto Nagara’s gentle message of firm resolve.
Passage: A Novel
by Khary Lazarre-WhiteSeven Stories Press (Sep 26, 2017)
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“In [Lazarre-White’s] world, mysticism and madness walk hand in hand with the waking reality of so many young Black men in America, a reality that by any rational measure is itself insane.” Susan L. Taylor
Passage tells the story of Warrior, a young black man navigating the snowy winter streets of Harlem and Brooklyn in 1993. Warrior is surrounded by deep family love and a sustaining connection to his history, bonds that arm him as he confronts the urban forces that surround him—both supernatural and human—including some that seek his very destruction.
For Warrior and his peers, the reminders that they, as black men, aren’t meant to be fully free, are everywhere. The high schools are filled with teachers who aren’t qualified and don’t care as much about their students’ welfare as that they pass the state exams. Getting from point A to point B usually means eluding violence, and possibly death, at the hands of the "blue soldiers" and your own brothers. Making it home means accepting that you may open the door to find that someone you love did not have the same good fortune.
Warrior isn’t even safe in his own mind. He’s haunted by the spirits of ancestors and of the demons of the system of oppression. Though the story told in Passage takes place in 1993, there is a striking parallel between Warrior’s experience and the experiences of black male youth today, since nothing has really changed. Every memory in the novel is the memory of thousands of black families. Every conversation is a message both to those still in their youth and those who left their youth behind long ago. Passage is a novel for then and now.
My Night in the Planetarium
by Innosanto NagaraTriangle Square (Nov 10, 2016)
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From the author/illustrator of the bestseller A is for Activist comes My Night in the Planetarium, a high-adventure, true story from his childhood in Indonesia. The thrill of spending the night in a museum is the capstone to a story ultimately about free speech, political progress, and artistic defiance. Featuring Inno’s gorgeous art style recognizable from A is for Activist, Counting on Community, and his joyous activism, My Night in the Planetarium cleverly and humorously combines history, geography, politics, and activism in an adventure story of childhood wonder, political resistance, and familial connection.
Seven year-old Innosanto’s father, a famous Indonesian playwright, is in trouble with the government for his newest play’s unfavorable portrayal of governmental power and corruption. After a rousing performance at a large theater complex which also houses the Jakarta Planetarium, Innosanto’s father manages to sneak out of town to avoid arrest while Innosanto and his mother spend an exciting night sleeping under the stars in the Jakarta Planetarium.
A beautiful introduction to the history and culture of Indonesia, My Night at the Planetarium is an engaging, thought-provoking starting point for a discussion of colonialism, political corruption, and artistic resistance.
Counting on Community
by Innosanto NagaraTriangle Square (Sep 22, 2015)
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Counting on Community is Innosanto Nagara’s follow-up to his hit ABC book, A is for Activist. Counting up from one stuffed piñata to ten hefty hens—and always counting on each other—children are encouraged to recognize the value of their community, the joys inherent in healthy eco-friendly activities, and the agency they posses to make change. A broad and inspiring vision of diversity is told through stories in words and pictures. And of course, there is a duck to find on every page!
Voices of a People’s History of the United States, 10th Anniversary Edition
by Howard ZinnSeven Stories Press (Nov 11, 2014)
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Selected testimonies to living history speeches letters poems songs offered by the people who make history happen but are often left out of history books women workers nonwhites Featuring introductions to the original texts by Howard Zinn New voices featured in this 10th Anniversary Edition include Chelsea Manning speaking after her 35 year prison sentence Naomi Klein speaking from the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Liberty Square a member of Dream Defenders a youth organization that confronts systemic racial inequality members of the Undocumented Youth movement who occupied marched and demonstrated in support of the DREAM Act a member of the Day Laborers movement Chicago Teachers Union strikers and several critics of the Obama administration including Glenn Greenwald on governmental secrecy Selected testimonies to living history speeches letters poems songs offered by the people who make history happen but are often left out of history books women workers nonwhites Featuring introductions to the original texts by Howard Zinn New voices featured in this 10th Anniversary Edition include Chelsea Manning speaking after her 35 year prison sentence Naomi Klein speaking from the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Liberty Square a member of Dream Defenders a youth organization that confronts systemic racial inequality members of the Undocumented Youth movement who occupied marched and demonstrated in support of the DREAM Act a member of the Day Laborers movement Chicago Teachers Union strikers and several critics of the Obama administration including Glenn Greenwald on governmental secrecy Selected testimonies to living history speeches letters poems songs left by the people who make history happen but are often left out of history books women workers nonwhites Introductions to the original texts by Zinn New voices being considered for this 10th Anniversary Edition include Chelsea Manning in the statement she
Everytime a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released: Collected and New Poems 1974-2011
by Barbara Chase-RiboudSeven Stories Press (Nov 04, 2014)
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The long breath of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s poems recalls poets of the antique world we know only from fragments, like Sappho. And yet here is a disquieting and sumptuous contemporary voice that seems to gather up antiquity and modernity with equal fervor and scorn. These poems are sexually charged, possessed of a courtly disdain and a strange nobility that seems to well up from below to be self-creating and unlike the verse of any other poet writing today.
Certainly one secret to this work is that Chase-Riboud’s poems are informed by her epic, polished bronze sculptures, as her sculptures are informed by her narrative fiction, and her fiction by her poems. The idea of the Renaissance Man is almost a cliché, but how often do we get to see what it means for an artist to be a Renaissance Woman? Chase-Riboud has been a major in sculpture, fiction, and poetry for close to half a century: selling over a million copies of her path-breaking novel Sally Hemings in the late ’70s, winning the Carl Sandburg Award for her second collection of poems in the late ’80s, and now, nearly thirty years later, on the heels of a major retrospective of her sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Berkeley Art Museum, here is Everytime a Knot is Undone, a God is Released, her first new and collected volume of verse.
A is for Activist
by Innosanto NagaraTriangle Square (Nov 19, 2013)
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“Reading it is almost like reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, but for two-year olds—full of pictures and rhymes and a little cat to find on every page that will delight the curious toddler and parents alike.”—Occupy Wall Street
A is for Activist is an ABC board book written and illustrated for the next generation of progressives: families who want their kids to grow up in a space that is unapologetic about activism, environmental justice, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, and everything else that activists believe in and fight for.
The alliteration, rhyming, and vibrant illustrations make the book exciting for children, while the issues it brings up resonate with their parents’ values of community, equality, and justice. This engaging little book carries huge messages as it inspires hope for the future, and calls children to action while teaching them a love for books.
Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How To Steal An Election In 9 Easy Steps
by Greg PalastSeven Stories Press (Sep 18, 2012)
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NOW A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!
A close presidential election in November could well come down to contested states or even districts—an election decided by vote theft? It could happen this year. Based on Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s investigative reporting for Rolling Stone and BBC television, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps might be the most important book published this year—one that could save the election. Last week Billionaires & Ballot Bandits debuted on the NYT Bestseller list at #10 in paperback nonfiction.
Billionaires & Ballot Bandits names the filthy-rich sugar-daddies who are super-funding the Super-PACs of both parties—billionaires with nicknames like "The Ice Man," "The Vulture" and, of course, The Brothers Koch. Told with Palast’s no-holds-barred, reporter-on-the-beat style, the facts as he lays them out are staggering. What emerges in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits is the never-before-told-story of the epic battle being fought behind the scenes between the old money banking sector that still supports Obama, and the new hedge fund billionaires like Paul Singer who not only support Romney but also are among his key economic advisors. Although it has not been reported, Obama has shown some backbone in standing up to the financial excesses of the men behind Romney. Billionaires & Ballot Bandits exposes the previously unreported details on how operatives plan to use the hundreds of millions in Super-PAC money pouring into this election. We know the money is pouring in, but Palast shows us the convoluted ways the money will be used to suppress your vote.
The story of the billionaires and why they want to buy an election is matched with the nine ways they can steal the election. His story of the sophisticated new trickery will pick up on Palast’s giant New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
Howard Zinn on History
by Howard ZinnSeven Stories Press (Jun 14, 2011)
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Howard Zinn began work on his first book for his friends at Seven Stories Press in 1996, a big volume collecting all his shorter writings organized by subject. The themes he chose reflected his lifelong concerns: war, history, law, class, means and ends, and race. Throughout his life Zinn had returned again and again to these subjects, continually probing and questioning yet rarely reversing his convictions or the vision that informed them. The result was The Zinn Reader. Five years later, starting with Howard Zinn on History, updated editions of sections of that mammoth tome were published in inexpensive stand-alone editions. This second edition of Howard Zinn on History brings together twenty-seven short writings on activism, electoral politics, the Holocaust, Marxism, the Iraq War, and the role of the historian, as well as portraits of Eugene Debs, John Reed, and Jack London, effectively showing how Zinn’s approach to history evolved over nearly half a century, and at the same time sharing his fundamental thinking that social movements—people getting together for peace and social justice—can change the course of history. That core belief never changed. Chosen by Zinn himself as the shorter writings on history he believed to have enduring value—originally appearing in newspapers like the Boston Globe or the New York Times; in magazines like Z, the New Left, the Progressive, or the Nation; or in his book Failure to Quit—these essays appear here as examples of the kind of passionate engagement he believed all historians, and indeed all citizens of whatever profession, need to have, standing in sharp contrast to the notion of "objective" or "neutral" history espoused by some. "It is time that we scholars begin to earn our keep in this world," he writes in "The Uses of Scholarship." And in "Freedom Schools," about his experiences teaching in Mississippi during the remarkable "Freedom Summer" of 1964, he adds: "Education can, and should, be dangerous."
Howard Zinn on War
by Howard ZinnSeven Stories Press (Jun 14, 2011)
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Howard Zinn began work on his first book for his friends at Seven Stories Press in 1996, a big volume collecting all his shorter writings organized by subject. The themes he chose reflected his lifelong concerns: war, history, law, class, means and ends, and race. Throughout his life Zinn had returned again and again to these subjects, continually probing and questioning yet rarely reversing his convictions or the vision that informed them. The result was The Zinn Reader. Five years later, starting with Howard Zinn on History, updated editions of sections of that mammoth tome were published in inexpensive stand-alone editions. This second edition of Howard Zinn on War is a collection of twenty-six short writings chosen by the author to represent his thinking on a subject that concerned and fascinated him throughout his career. He reflects on the wars against Iraq, the war in Kosovo, the Vietnam War, World War II, and on the meaning of war generally in a world of nations that can’t seem to stop destroying each other. These readings appeared first in magazines and newspapers including the Progressive and the Boston Globe, as well as in Zinn’s books, Failure to Quit, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, The Politics of History, and Declarations of Independence. Here we see Zinn’s perspective as a World War II veteran and peace activist who lived through the most devastating wars of the twentieth century and questioned every one of them with his combination of integrity and historical acumen. In his essay, "Just and Unjust War," Zinn challenges us to fight for justice "with struggle, but without war." He writes in "After the War (2006) that while governments bring us into war, "their power is dependent on the obedience of the citizenry. When that is withdrawn, governments are helpless." In Howard Zinn on War, his message is clear: "The abolition of war has become not only desirable but absolutely necessary if the planet is to be saved. It is an idea whose time has come."
Howard Zinn on Race
by Howard ZinnSeven Stories Press (Jun 14, 2011)
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Howard Zinn on Race is Zinn’s choice of the shorter writings and speeches that best reflect his views on America’s most taboo topic. As chairman of the history department at all black women’s Spelman College, Zinn was an outspoken supporter of student activists in the nascent civil rights movement. In "The Southern Mystique," he tells of how he was asked to leave Spelman in 1963 after teaching there for seven years. "Behind every one of the national government’s moves toward racial equality," writes Zinn in one 1965 essay, "lies the sweat and effort of boycotts, picketing, beatings, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations." He firmly believed that bringing people of different races and nationalities together would create a more compassionate world, where equality is a given and not merely a dream. These writings, which span decades, express Zinn’s steadfast belief that the people have the power to change the status quo, if they only work together and embrace the nearly forgotten American tradition of civil disobedience and revolution. In clear, compassionate, and present prose, Zinn gives us his thoughts on the Abolitionists, the march from Selma to Montgomery, John F. Kennedy, picketing, sit-ins, and, finally, the message he wanted to send to New York University students about race in a speech he delivered during the last week of his life.
Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street
by Lee StringerSeven Stories Press (Jul 06, 2010)
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Whether Lee Stringer is describing "God’s corner" as he calls 42nd Street, or his friend Suzy, a hooker and "past due tourist" whose infant child he sometimes babysits, whether he is recounting his experiences at Street News, where he began hawking the newspaper for a living wage, then wrote articles, and served for a time as muckraking senior editor, whether it is his adventures in New York’s infamous Tombs jail, or performing community service, or sleeping in the tunnels below Grand Central Station by night and collecting cans by day, this is a book rich with small acts of kindness, humor and even heroism alongside the expected violence and desperation of life on the street. There is always room, Stringer writes, "amid the costume" jewel glitter…for one more diamond in the rough."
Two events rise over Grand Central Winter like sentinels: Stringer’s discovery of crack cocaine and his catching the writing bug. Between these two very different yet oddly similar activities, Lee’s life unwound itself, during the 1980s, and took the shape of an odyssey, an epic struggle to find meaning and happiness in arid times. He eventually beat the first addiction with help from a treatment program. The second addiction, writing, has hold of him still.
Among the many accomplishments of this book is that Stringer is able to convey something of the vitality and complexity of a down—and—out life. The reader walks away from it humming its melody, one that is more wise than despairing, less about the shame we feel when confronted with a picture of those less fortunate, and more about the joy we feel when we experience our shared humanity.
The Black Body
by Meri Nana-Ama DanquahSeven Stories Press (Oct 06, 2009)
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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 are 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, political strategist Kimball Stroud, television producer Joel Lipman, former Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts, and singer-songwriter Jason Luckett.
Ranging from deeply serious to playful, sometimes hilarious, musings, these essays explore myriad issues with wisdom and a deep sense of history. Meri Nana-Ama Danquah’s unprecedented collection illuminates the diversity of identities and individual experiences that define the black body in our culture.
A Young People’s History of the United States: Columbus to the War on Terror
by Howard ZinnTriangle Square (Jun 02, 2009)
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A Young People’s History of the United States brings to US history the viewpoints of workers, slaves, immigrants, women, Native Americans, and others whose stories, and their impact, are rarely included in books for young people. A Young People’s History of the United States is also a companion volume to The People Speak, the film adapted from A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States.
Beginning with a look at Christopher Columbus’s arrival through the eyes of the Arawak Indians, then leading the reader through the struggles for workers’ rights, women’s rights, and civil rights during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ending with the current protests against continued American imperialism, Zinn in the volumes of A Young People’s History of the United States presents a radical new way of understanding America’s history. In so doing, he reminds readers that America’s true greatness is shaped by our dissident voices, not our military generals.
The Unraveling of the Bush Presidency
by Howard ZinnSeven Stories Press (Jul 03, 2007)
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Here, in the magisterial yet plain-spoken style of A People’s History of the United States, is historian Howard Zinn’s long-awaited telling of these last six years of United States history, a time when catastrophic machinations of war have dictated our foreign and domestic policy, and when voices of resistance have appeared in the unlikeliest places.
Perhaps more than any other American, Howard Zinn has helped us understand ourselves by deepening our understanding of our own history.
A Young People’s History Of The United States, Volume 1: Columbus To The Spanish-American War (For Young People Series)
by Howard ZinnTriangle Square (May 01, 2007)
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A Young People’s History of the United States brings to US history the viewpoints of workers, slaves, immigrants, women, Native Americans, and others whose stories, and their impact, are rarely included in books for young people. A Young People’s History of the United States is also a companion volume to The People Speak, the film adapted from A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States.
Beginning with a look at Christopher Columbus’s arrival through the eyes of the Arawak Indians, then leading the reader through the struggles for workers’ rights, women’s rights, and civil rights during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ending with the current protests against continued American imperialism, Zinn in the volumes of A Young People’s History of the United States presents a radical new way of understanding America’s history. In so doing, he reminds readers that America’s true greatness is shaped by our dissident voices, not our military generals.
A Young People’s History Of The United States: Class Struggle To The War On Terror (Volume 2)
by Howard ZinnTriangle Square (May 01, 2007)
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A Young People’s History of the United States brings to US history the viewpoints of workers, slaves, immigrants, women, Native Americans, and others whose stories, and their impact, are rarely included in books for young people. A Young People’s History of the United States is also a companion volume to The People Speak, the film adapted from A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States.
Beginning with a look at Christopher Columbus’s arrival through the eyes of the Arawak Indians, then leading the reader through the struggles for workers’ rights, women’s rights, and civil rights during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ending with the current protests against continued American imperialism, Zinn in the volumes of A Young People’s History of the United States presents a radical new way of understanding America’s history. In so doing, he reminds readers that America’s true greatness is shaped by our dissident voices, not our military generals.
United States v. George W. Bush et al.
by Elizabeth De La VegaSeven Stories Press (Nov 07, 2006)
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What if there were a fraud worse than Enron and no one did anything about it?
In United States v. George W. Bush et. al., former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega brings her twenty years of experience and her passion for justice to the most important case of her career. The defendants are George W Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell. The crime is tricking the nation into war, or, in legal terms, conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Ms. de la Vega has reviewed the evidence, researched the law, drafted an indictment, and in this lively, accessible book, presented it to a grand jury. If the indictment and grand jury are both hypothetical, the facts are tragically real: Over half of all Americans believe the president misled the country into a war that has left 2,500 hundred American soldiers and countless Iraqis dead. The cost is $350 billion — and counting.
The legal question is: Did the president and his team use the same techniques as those used by Enron’s Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and fraudsters everywhere — false pretenses, half-truths, deliberate omissions — in order to deceive Congress and the American public?
Take advantage of this rare opportunity to "sit" with the grand jurors as de la Vega presents a case of prewar fraud that should persuade any fair-minded person who loves this country as much as she so obviously does. Faced with an ongoing crime of such magnitude, she argues, we can not simply shrug our shoulders and walk away.
Impeach The President: The Case Against Bush And Cheney
by Dennis Loo and Peter PhillipsSeven Stories Press (Oct 03, 2006)
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This brilliantly argued and wonderfully written collection by twenty-two of the best political analysts in the US analyzes the extraordinary and unprecedented threat the White House and its allies present to civil liberties, civil rights, the Constitution, international law, and the future of the planet.
Impeach the President unearths the stories behind election fraud in 2000 and 2004, the overt lies used to justify pre-emptive war on Iraq, the extensive, ongoing commission of war crimes and torture, the tragic failures in the lead-up to and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and lesser-known but equally alarming offences of propaganda and disinformation, illegal spying, environmental destruction, and the violation of the separation of church and state. Loo and Phillips chillingly reveal the full threat behind the radical right-wing force that has taken over the world’s most powerful office.
A Black Way of Seeing: From Liberty to Freedom
by Paul Robeson Jr.Seven Stories Press (May 02, 2006)
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In the tradition of James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, Robeson’s A Black Way of Seeing melds history and analysis in a sweeping panorama of the present moment as we know it to be—scathing in its understanding of why Black empowerment has failed and prescient in its articulation of what it will take for Black Americans to be agents of change for the country as a whole.
Bloodchild and Other Stories
by Octavia ButlerSeven Stories Press (Oct 04, 2005)
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A perfect introduction for new readers and a must-have for avid fans, this New York Times Notable Book includes "Bloodchild," winner of both the Hugo and the Nebula awards and "Speech Sounds," winner of the Hugo Award. Appearing in print for the first time, "Amnesty" is a story of a woman named Noah who works to negotiate the tense and co-dependent relationship between humans and a species of invaders. Also new to this collection is "The Book of Martha" which asks: What would you do if God granted you the ability—and responsibility—to save humanity from itself?
Like all of Octavia Butler’s best writing, these works of the imagination are parables of the contemporary world. She proves constant in her vigil, an unblinking pessimist hoping to be proven wrong, and one of contemporary literature’s strongest voices.
Fledgling: A Novel
by Octavia ButlerSeven Stories Press (Sep 08, 2005)
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Fledgling, Octavia Butler’s last novel, is the story of an apparently young, amnesiac girl whose alarmingly un-human needs and abilities lead her to a startling conclusion: she is in fact a genetically modified, 53-year-old vampire. Forced to discover what she can about her stolen former life, she must at the same time learn who wanted—and still wants—to destroy her and those she cares for, and how she can save herself. Fledgling is a captivating novel that tests the limits of "otherness" and questions what it means to be truly human.
Artists in Times of War
by Howard ZinnSeven Stories Press (Sep 02, 2003)
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"Political power," says Howard Zinn, "is controlled by the corporate elite, and the arts are the locale for a kind of guerilla warfare in the sense that guerillas look for apertures and opportunities where they can have an effect." In Artists in Times of War, Zinn looks at the possibilities to create such apertures through art, film, activism, publishing and through our everyday lives. In this collection of four essays, the author of A People’s History of the United States writes about why "To criticize the government is the highest act of patriotism." Filled with quotes and examples from the likes of Bob Dylan, Mark Twain, e. e. cummings, Thomas Paine, Joseph Heller, and Emma Goldman, Zinn’s essays discuss America’s rich cultural counternarratives to war, so needed in these days of unchallenged U.S. militarism.
Are Prisons Obsolete?
by Angela DavisSeven Stories Press (Aug 05, 2003)
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With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly, the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.
In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for decarceration, and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.
When Harlem Nearly Killed King: The 1958 Stabbing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
by Hugh PearsonSeven Stories Press (Feb 05, 2002)
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When Harlem Nearly Killed King spins the tale of a little-known episode in the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. how, in 1958, King was stabbed by a deranged black woman in Harlem, and then saved by Harlem Hospital’s most acclaimed African-American surgeon, using a little known and difficult procedure.
Pearson recreates America at the dawn of the civil rights movement, and in so doing probes and examines the living body politic of the nation, black and white, and shows us how change really occurs: painfully, not in one grand gesture, but in a thousand small and contradictory ways.
As the story of When Harlem Nearly Killed King unfolds, it offers up surprising truths: how Harlem’s leading black bookseller was snubbed by King and his entourage in favor of a Jewish-owned department store; and how the acclaimed surgeon seems not to have been the doctor responsible for the surgery. As truths and apocrypha clash in these pages, what emerges is a powerful picture of change in race perspectives in America, and how such change really occurs — reminding us today that race in America is still unfinished business.
All Things Censored
by Mumia Abu-JamalSeven Stories Press (May 10, 2001)
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More than 75 essays—many freshly composed by Mumia with the cartridge of a ball-point pen, the only implement he is allowed in his death-row cell—embody the calm and powerful words of humanity spoken by a man on Death Row. Abu-Jamal writes on many different topics, including the ironies that abound within the U.S. prison system and the consequences of those ironies, and his own case. Mumia’s composure, humor, and connection to the living world around him represents an irrefutable victory over the "corrections" system that has for two decades sought to isolate and silence him.
The title, All Things Censored, refers to Mumia’s hiring as an on-air columnist by National Public Radio’s "All Things Considered," and subsequent banning from that venue under pressure from law and order groups.