March 31, 2026 marks the 16th annual Trans Day of Visibility. Created in 2010 by psychotherapist and human rights activist Rachel Crandall, Trans Day of Visibility is a celebration of the extraordinary lives and cultural contributions of trans people. It is also a moment to acknowledge and campaign against the disproportionate levels of discrimination, violence, and political repression faced by trans communities all over the world, and especially in the United States in 2026.

To celebrate the occasion, and because we’ll take any excuse to share work by Cat Fitzpatrick, we’re excited to share an excerpt from Fitzpatrick’s iconic 2022 debut novel, The Call-Out, winner of the 2023 Lambda Award for Transgender Fiction. Noted by McKenzie Wark for how it “turns t-girl gossip into fine art,” The Call-Out is a passionate and delightful tragicomedy of manners, written entirely in verse.

The excerpt below opens the book, which follows Aashvi, Kate, Bette, Keiko, Gaia, and Day, six queer women surviving and thriving in Brooklyn, NY.

a year begins,
with some flirtation
(1/14)

New Year. Of course, I went out drinking.
Everyone knows that I’m a lush:
talk is much jollier than thinking,
you’re never so light as in a crush.
A friend of mine had a shift bartending,
stirring up negronis and hand-blending
frozen margaritas like a pro,
and everyone who was in the know
had come to drink her potent potions.
The bar was full, the bar was loud
(what else would you expect from a crowd
with testo voices, but estro emotions?),
“sexy mean” and “kinky dork,”
half the damn trans girls in New York.

Probably somewhere someone was crying
or fighting, but as far as I could see
flirtatious chatter and lustful spying
was the dominant activity.
Look, for instance, with what evident meaning
that girl in denim, awkwardly leaning
against the wall,
flicks her eyes across
at that one with hair like candy floss.
Pink Hair peeks back, then drains her libation,
pulls out her fags, slides off her chair
and leaves the bar, tossing her hair.
Denim, with a shake of determination,
as if dismissing a lingering doubt
crosses the room, and follows her out.

Intentions, however, need application
and Denim (alright, her name is Day)
instead gets stuck in hesitation
as she exits through the entranceway.
How do you cope if you get a rejection?
And facing a girl of such femme perfection,
how do you avoid being cast as the bloke?
But now, she’s outside, without a smoke,
or much in the way of warm attire,
in a New York winter, in the freezing air,
and she’s freezing up. But then Pink Hair
(sensing her plight? Or from desire?)
turns, and says —“Hi, I’m Bette.
Perhaps you’d like a cigarette?”

Bette understands the implication.
She smiles back —“Oh, is that true?
I hear it aids the, um, circulation?”
Pauses. “Hey, I love your tattoo!”
A classic gambit. She is alluding
to where on Day’s wrist, pointedly protruding
below her cuff, a “T4T”
is rendered, amateurishly.
—“That? That’s nothing!” Day laughs. It’s colder
than weather should be, but she’s keen to impress
this girl, and so she proceeds to undress,
baring an image on her shoulder
of fallopian tubes attached to a pentacle,
and unzipping her jeans to reveal a tentacle.

Although they’re only newly acquainted
Bette seems unfazed by these displays.
—“Wow, they’re pretty. It’s like they’re painted!”
She bends to inspect, and there she stays
allowing the heat of her breath to linger
for a second, before extending a finger,
then stopping, and asking, “um . . . can I touch?”
And that’s enough! Or else too much.
I’m of an older generation,
I’ve learnt what sex can put at stake for us;
I don’t know what to make
of all these kids and their liberation.
I know they’re blithe and fresh and free,
but it’s all a bit too much for me.

What am I doing in this vision?
I never expected to end up here.
I grew up surrounded by derision,
everyone rejected me, straight or queer.
And now I’m thirty-something, I’m single,
I’m drinking whilst these youngsters mingle.
Perhaps I’m jealous, even obsessed;
I’m also worried. We’re second-best
(here I pause to down my whisky)
even to other “girls like us.”
If you’re trans, the truth is thus:
even dreaming of love is risky.
I watch through the window with growing dismay.
I don’t try to warn them, but I can’t look away.

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The Call-Out

A Novel in Rhyme
By Cat Fitzpatrick

A fast-paced, debut tragicomedy of manners written in verse that is funny, literary, philosophical, witty, sometimes bitchy and sometimes heartbreaking.

Aashvi, Kate, Bette, Keiko, Gaia, and Day are six queer women surviving and thriving in Brooklyn. Visiting all the fixtures of fashionable 21st century queer society—picnics, literary readings, health conferences, drag shows, punk houses, community accountability processes, Grindr hookups—The Call-Out also engages with pressing questions around economic precarity, sexual consent, racism in queer spaces, and feminist theory, in the service of asking what it takes to build, or destroy, a marginalized community.

A novel written in verse, The Call-Out recalls the Russian literary classic Eugene Onegin, but instead of 19th century Russian aristocrats crudely solved their disagreements with pistols, the participants in this rhyming drama have developed a more refined weapon, the online call-out, a cancel-culture staple. In this passionate tangle of modern relationships, where a barbed tweet can be as dangerous as the narrator’s bon-mots, Cat Fitzpatrick has fashioned a modern novel of manners that gives readers access to a vibrant cultural underground.

CAT FITZPATRICK's debut novel, The Call-Out (Seven Stories Press, 2022), was awarded the 2023 Lambda Award for Transgender Fiction. She is the author of the poetry collection Glamour­puss (Topside Press, 2016), and the co-editor of the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction & Fantasy from Transgender Writers, which won the ALA Stonewall Award for Literature. Fitzpatrick is the first trans woman Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Rutgers University–Newark, and she also serves as the Editrix at LittlePuss Press. The Dinner Party (Seven Stories Press, 2026) is her second novel in verse.

In September 2024, before they joined forces with Seven Stories Press, Two Dollar Radio released Us Fools, the debut novel by Nora Lange, which went on to be a Los Angeles Times bestseller, a best book of the year at The Boston Globe and NPR, and win the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, for which Joy Williams wrote the award citation. Now, Seven Stories and Two Dollar Radio are thrilled to publish, together, Nora’s second book, a story collection called Day Care, on April 7, 2026 in the U.S., and on April 30, 2026 in the UK.

Whereas Us Fools as a love story between two sisters growing up during the farm crisis of the 1980s in rural Illinois, Day Care offers a collection of stories that grapple with identity and belonging, all while navigating overbearing mothers, marriage, young hip neighbors in a competitive housing market, eccentric bosses, and new motherhood in a style that is rambunctious and hilarious. If you’re curious to take a peak (and we hope that you are), the story “Hot Spot” was excerpted by The New Yorker last summer, while Granta just published the title story last week.

Hannah Pittard, author of If You Love It, Let It Kill You, says “Lange is unwilling, uninterested, and unsympathetic to storytelling that traffics in the maudlin, mundane, or murky. The stories of Day Care are brutal, hilarious, and relentless; they are pedal to the metal, which is to say: divine and not a little bit insane.”

Following is a conversation with the author about her work.

Question: You’ve had quite the year. We’ve spoken on the phone countless times, but the only two opportunities we’ve had to meet in person have been this spring at award ceremonies: at the National Book Critics Circle Award in March, and at the ceremony for the American Academy of Arts and Letters a few weeks ago, when they presented you the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. You got to hang out with Rita Bullwinkel, Ed Park, Amy Hempel, and we got some amazing pictures of you with Joy Williams, who actually wrote your award citation in the processional. Did you expect any of what transpired when Us Fools was published in September 2024?

Nora Lange: Absolutely not! This might be the easiest question for me to answer of all time—thank you for that. The chronology of ‘awesome’ went something like this: Two Dollar Radio made a pitch to me about the novel. Eric and I spoke on the phone where he said some really catchy things, which had me near tears. It was the house for the book, full stop. Then nice things began rolling in, like blurbs from writers I admire that I had worked hard to attain. At the time I was working a new job and living alone caring for our one-year old daughter M-F, which is to say I was feeling pretty depleted. I remember when I received the email from Kimberly King Parsons telling me that she loved loved loved the book, I did cry that night. I felt elated. From there, it was just one delightful ripple after the next. Looking back, I think me and the Two Dollar’s team gelled in such a stunning way that this feeling must have been good for the universe, right? As in—nothing could have gone badly as we were sailing along in our little ship together, and from there things could only get kinder.

Plus, the novel is clucking good.

Q: To follow up on that, has it impacted your approach as a writer? Do you feel added pressure now when you’re considering new work?

NL: I feel like I get to say without hesitation that I am a writer. (Though, to be honest, even still those words feel clanky in my mouth.)

Pressure? Keep in mind that any moment my toddler might take a dump in my shoe. (True story, I was holding her and she took a shit in my Ugg knockoffs back in January—the size of a horse’s shit. Kid you not.)

Q: Us Fools was praised by Molly Young in the New York Times as the “Great American Novel,” and called “a razor-sharp critique of American capitalism” by Michael Schaub at NPR. This new collection also taps into American consumption, contradictions, and identity. As Eleanor Henderson so eloquently stated in her review in the New York Times, how do you feel as though you’re able to “[map] the uncrossable distance between the coasts and the heartland, between the America we’ve been and the America we want to be?”

NL: I am hopeful. I am skeptical. I also don’t try to do anything other than resolve, or attempt to, the puzzles that puzzle me. America is one such riddle and I am grateful when a reader wants to sit captain with me, or allows me into their caravan. I have no answers. I am an explorer. I work really hard to both feel myself out alongside the topics or conundrums I wish to pursue. That—the personal (eye and body), which meets the terrestrial universal, (nation and academy)—is the fabric I weave, it so seems.

Q: We were on the phone a month or two ago, and I couldn’t stop laughing as I essentially recounted what happened in your own story, “Heart Beats.” Which you of course were especially familiar with having written it, so thank you for bearing with me. I don’t believe that humor is easy to write, and so much of it is about pacing and precision, yet you seem to make it appear effortless, while also using it as a vehicle to be particularly insightful and even scathing at moments. How important is humor in your writing?

NL: Humor is everything. My dad has a bumper sticker that was pinned above the microwave that I saw every time I was visiting his house in rural Oregon, which said: Guilt is the Gift that keeps on Giving.

Sometimes I mishear things. My partner says that I hear the things I want to hear, but genuinely I believe that the sentiment came from the person’s mouth, which it turns out hadn’t. The point is I begin to laugh uncontrollably. Nothing can stop my crouching over in laughter. Everyone around me thinks I am a lunatic—I am laughing too hard to share what I’ve heard, which wouldn’t matter since nobody heard what I did. And all because of a fiction.

Q: You’ve mentioned that one of the newer pieces you wrote for the collection, “A Celebration,” is more tonally similar to a longer novel you’re at work on. I don’t think there’s as much humor or introspection there. Is this a new direction you see yourself moving in?

NL: “A Celebration” was written after I had heard from Cressida at the New Yorker, who was open to seeing more work. The issue for me when her email came in, was that I was heavily back into my second novel, Proofs, and felt like I needed to stay with it. So, instead of turning elsewhere, I simply looked at my pages and created a new short story from them. This allowed me to “stay in it”; in the project and not veer away. So, in that respect it’s a part of a longer novel project in progress, and other parts of this project are indeed funnier. I do think the story has snippets of humor, such as the ex getting pregnant by the fishmonger who ran a fish shop on the ground level of the apartment building. It’s just a tamer humor? More subterranean? Less overtly ironic, perhaps not now that I think about the character, a performance artist, who goes by Simone Deux who is the heiress to the Tootsie Roll fortune. But tonally, yes, I think in that regard the piece is very different. Less punchy, if you will. Also, I think it’s entirely about introspection. Though that process—of maneuvering our personal insides—is happening as our protagonist moves through the world with these other characters. In that sense, it could be compared to the way Bernie, in Us Fools, sees herself, forms her character, in relationship to her sister, Jo.

Q: Some of the pieces might also be considered autofiction, such as the stories “Last Boob Feed” or “Landfills.” What about the form intrigues you?

NL: I woke up at 3am with a pukey child and I was thinking about how writing for me, in each instance, despite the differences between projects (novels v. short stories v. essays), I am writing a letter to readers. The form provides a different way to access the material of life, and therefore to connect with a reader. Nonfiction, such as it is, reminds me of the stage, of theater: where “real people,” “irl,” perform or play characters, either based on real people, or fictional ones, sometimes alive, sometimes not, but those people are bringing those people to life before an audience. Just think about it. I am thinking about it and about fictions v. nonfiction, so forth.

In general, I am not a fan of sharply delineating between genres. I do not think it was a big preoccupation in the past. I do realize it’s a market-driven interest, but I don’t like when Google suggests that I look at something that’s “for me”. Besides, if there’s a writer writing there’s an ‘auto’, which in Greek means ‘self.’

This, ours, is a culture of longing, to be safe, to have fuller lips, a fuller ass, to love fully, to get it right, to reach others. So much more.

Q: Who are some writers who you feel have influenced your work?

NL: Lydia Davis, Catherine Lacey, Elizabeth Kolbert, Rachel Cusk, Roberto Bolano (huge time), Percival Everett, Carole Maso. Gosh, so many. I’d give you a noogie if you were here asking me this question in person!

Q: If you weren’t a writer, is there another profession you could potentially see yourself working in that you’d enjoy?

NL: Scientist, in ecology. A dancer, forever. Despite my spinal fusion, I love to bend.

NORA LANGE’s debut novel Us Fools was awarded the The Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, named a best book of 2024 by The Boston Globe and NPR, a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, BOMB, Hazlitt, and elsewhere. Her project “Dailyness” was longlisted for the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers. She has received fellowships from Brown University and is a fellow at USC’s Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities. She recently moved to Salt Lake City with her family.

Welcome to the March installment of our monthly staff recommendation series, in which Seven Stories Press staffers each tell you about something they’re reading or listening to or watching or otherwise enjoying in their free time.

See you next month 💕

Allison (Web Manager)

To Smithereens by Rosalyn Drexler

I’d been circling this book for months and never felt particularly grabbed by the description, but decided to pick it up on a whim after my boss’s book launch (Ashland!). I’m so glad I did! To Smithereens follows an exceptionally mid art critic with a fetish for big strong women who finds himself in a movie theater seated next to — surprise-surprise! — a big strong woman. Naturally, he sexually harasses her until she agrees to go out with him, and then he convinces her to become a professional wrestler. Naturally, she’s a natural. Naturally, she wants nothing to do with him after her career starts taking off. Naturally, it all comes to a head in Mexico. I won’t say anything more, lest I spoil it for you, but it’s quite fun and the actual physical book is quite beautiful (In fact, the cover art was painted by Rosalyn Drexler herself! I also highly recommend reading about her because, man, that woman has lived).

Eden (Senior Intern)

Mary Ruefle, On Erasure: Visual and Textual

I got the chance to see an exhibition of Mary Ruefle’s erasure books—of which she’s made over 100—at Poets House last year (with our Production Editor Maddy! woohoo), which was a delightful glance into Ruefle’s erasure world. In lieu of this foregone exhibit, maybe the next best thing is her poetic lecture on erasure from the 2015 Palm Beach Poetry Festival, in which she talks about Tom Philipp’s erasure art book A Humument, William Basinski’s disintegrating tape album The Disintegration Loops, Bill Morrison’s movie of deteriorating film footage Decasia, and her own process of “taking words out of the world.” And as a bonus, you can then read one of her erasure books, Melody, for free online!

Ho Ying (Special Projects Manager)

I Dream of Dinner (so You Don’t Have To) by Ali Slagle

I started cooking more during COVID, and I grew to appreciate Ali Slagle‘s recipes (this Thai-inspired meatball soup remains in heavy rotation). Slagle’s recipes tend to have fewer steps and ingredients than you’d expect, without compromising the flavor of the dish. Her cookbook, published in 2022, puts right in the subtitle why I love her work: these are Low-Effort, High-Reward Recipes. As someone who grinds 52.2 grams of single-origin coffee every morning before pouring 900 milliliters of 208º F water at a rate of 37.5 ml/sec, I appreciate a cookbook that explicitly states, “Just remember: Do more with less. Don’t overthink it. And also: It’s only dinner.”

Irina (Assistant Publicist)

Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga

I’ve been taking my time getting through Scholastique Mukasongas's short but profound memoir about the Rwandan genocide. The simple language she uses to describe her family’s suffering makes this a tragically beautiful tribute to those she lost. I am in awe of the strength it must take to write such a book. This is a heavy read, but so necessary and painfully resonant today.

Lou (Web and Marketing Assistant)

Jaw Filler by Charlie Markbreiter and Maz Murray

My winter-long reading slump was finally broken with Charlie Markbreiter and Maz Murray’s JAW FILLER, the best novel about transmasculinity I’ve read in years. Maz and Charlie’s portrait of a community is witheringly sharp, and the plot is incredibly propulsive. Fans of Gary Indiana looking for a contemporary skewering with the smarts and writing skills to back up the jabs should pick this one up.

Nadya Tolokonnikova’s Police State

I can’t stop thinking about Nadya Tolokonnikova’s performance piece POLICE STATE, which I was fortunate enough to see in person at Chicago’s MCA this past November. The space evoked a stomach-churning dread, and Tolokonnikova’s use of duration (you can leave; she cannot) was brilliantly executed. While there are no future performances planned, you can listen to the gorgeous soundscapes created live during the MoCA iteration of the performance on YouTube. There’s also a book about the exhibition I’m eager to check out.

Maddy (Production Editor)

Flower by Ed Atkins

Ed Atkins is a contemporary artist from the UK & his FLOWER was one of my favorite things that I read last year. It’s this idiosyncratic yet relatable series of observations about himself, the world, and the way the two encounter each other. It’s sort of confessional, sort of digressive, very personal, and very funny. Aphoristic without ever trafficking in cliché, Atkins finds a way to write about everything from grocery store wraps to fatherhood, and his syntax has an endearing way of getting stuck in your head. There’s also a great interview between him and Dan Fox about the book & his influences if that’s more your speed.

High School, directed by Frederick Wiseman

As you may already know, the great documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman passed away a few weeks ago, so there’s no better time to get into his rich and extensive body of work. In HIGH SCHOOL, Wiseman’s seemingly invisible camera captures with sensitivity & intimacy the tumult and intergenerational conflict of 1960s America through the everyday encounters of students and teachers. It’s funny, infuriating and remarkably watchable, and also features some of the most wonderful Delco accents I’ve ever heard. This scene in particular is one I go back to often.

Sofia (Assistant Editor)

All That Jazz, directed by Bob Fosse

My coworker Maddy and I recently watched this movie together—it became an instant favorite. It’s surreal, self-reflective, egotistical. It’s chock-full of insanely well-choreographed musical numbers and songs like George Benson’s “On Broadway” that worm into your ear canal well after the gut-punch of a final act. Bob Fosse is equally a mad man and a genius for making this film. His expert pacing reveals all-at-once the harsh realities and jubilant rewards of the intangible, highly sought after, mystical world of showbiz. It is both a fond and critical eulogy, an ode to creative passions and following one’s dreams, no matter the cost. Watch whenever you are in an inspiration deficit, or when you need to dance/sing/perform to your friends and roommates and coworkers to make sense of your feelings!

Silencio by Clyo Mendoza

I snuck a galley out of the office as soon as they arrived. . . and finished it about a day later. This book is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful. I fell in love with Mendoza’s language in her novel Fury, which was the first Seven Stories book I read as an employee. In Silencio, Mendoza’s poeticism is explored in full—her descriptions of the natural world, of the stages of life, of life in Mexico, are raw and visceral. She’s not afraid to veer into the absurd. The book is told in short vignettes that take up irregular forms on the white space of the pages. She includes surreal excerpts from the perspective of native animals and paragraphs written in indigenous languages (spoken by children who use and create language in small whispers of resistance). Mendoza’s pen is purposeful and her anger is devastating: I flipped the pages like they were on fire. It ‘s the sort of book you want to read and then read again, taking something new each time and letting the silence of your reading be in honor of those who have been disappeared.

To celebrate the publication of Field Notes from an Extinction, the second novel by indie bookstore darling and acclaimed poet Eoghan Walls, we’re proud to share an excerpt from the book, described by Graeme Macrae Burnet, in a new review in The New York Times, as “a unique and richly imagined novel.” The extract, taken from the start of the book, begins the moment protagonist Ignatius Green realizes that a small child has stowed away on his boat and crashed his fieldwork mission to study the Auks on Tory Island, Ireland.

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Monday, 31st May, 1847

The islandmen have smuggled a child onto Tor Mor Rock.

That I did not adequately register the basket in which the child was stowed is likely due to my state of perturbation at the obvious interference with my supplies. I was awaiting the delivery agreed already on October the 17th, 1846, with Hancock of Londonderry (formally of Staffordshire), in addition to supplemental grains to replace what was hitherto lost to rain, spillage & theft from the last delivery; to wit;

pease, one sack;
oatmeal, two sacks;
wheat flour, two sacks;
dried biscuit, one chest;
English cheese, one large wheel;
suet, a five pound slab;
butter, a five pound slab;
coal, five sacks;
whale oil, one bushel;
soured grog, one hogshead;
raisins, ten lbs;
dried apple, five lbs;
personal effects (ink, paper, etc), one chest;
replacement taxidermist’s tools, one chest;
brandy, two gallons;
lemon juice, one gallon;
fine tobacco (provenance immaterial), four lbs;
London gin, one gallon;
side of beef, one;
smoked Galician pig, one half-carcass.

Provisions enough for one man alone for one month entire on the rock with no need to journey inland. Missing this time was the beef; both sacks of wheat flour; one flask of brandy; the cheese. As further insult, much of the pig had been roughly cut away & but poorly wrapped thereafter, leaving only a ragged shoulder, the spine & bared ribs protruding from the torn bindings, left to rudely flap in the hail.

Even in the glum half-light of the late hail from Iceland, the theft was obvious, but the men were diffident, blank faced as poachers. Disputed with them at length on the shore. That thin pish Liam McGonigle is the only one of this batch admitting to passing competency in English.

MYSELF: The garefowl have laid, McGonigle. I cannot leave the island currently. It is an act of thievery that has been carried out here. Theft.

MCGONIGLE: I can only tell you again what I have told you already, sir, we bring you straightaways what we receive from Hancock. None of my men would dream of touching it, sure don’t we depend on the money you bring in.

His tone circumlocutory, his manner obsequious. His fellows scrawny, muttering their guttural tongue. He held the wet manifest to shield his face from the full force of the hail. I snatched it from him.

MYSELF: You are honestly trying to tell me you have not nabbed almost half of my provisions?

MCGONIGLE: I would be offended at the suggestion, sir.

MYSELF: Speak up, man.

MCGONIGLE: Offended, sir. I would be offended, sir. That is to say, no sir.

The ink wet on the page. The rest of the men, done unloading the goods, were already turning back to their vessel. Two thin boys—couldn’t be more than twelve—had already retired from manual labour, having fallen to coughing fits during disembarkation, & wailed loudly from the boat.

Skinny monkey youths, spluttering under a tarpaulin.

MYSELF: Do not turn from me, McGonigle. We are not done here. I must tally the rest of the shipment & keep an exact log of delivery.

MCGONIGLE: I must apologise but I am afraid further dalliance will not be possible tonight, sir. The tides as they are, we must get back before dark if we are to not come afoul of the Blind Rocks.

All his bluster & wheedling & still his uneven grin. He comes recommended by Sir Phillip. Worked with him on the tea ships for five years, supposedly one of the decent ones, & my reliance upon these islanders must extend another six to ten weeks yet. Sir Phillip will hang his head when he hears of his oversight in judgment! I shd have seized him, made him open each container before me. But his lank shipmen shook, coatless. It had taken three of them to carry a chest I could have easily managed on my own, & Connie’s lamentations of the starving Irish in her broadsheets must have addled my heart.

But not one of them would meet me in the eye, & one of them, I swear, was laughing into his sleeve.

MYSELF: What are they saying, Liam?

MCGONIGLE: What, sir?

MYSELF: That one there. What did he say?

MCGONIGLE: It is untranslatable, sir.

Half of them wading already into the choppy black sea, trousers still dark from disembarkation. McGonigle would only heed me when I held him.

MYSELF: Do not turn from me!

MCGONIGLE: (gesturing to youths on the boat) My nephews, sir. I have to get them out of the squall.

MYSELF: You think I am at your mercy, McGonigle. But it is you & your family who are dependent upon my good graces. Sir Phillip will hear of this.

MCGONIGLE: (utterly unabashed) I will inform him myself of the missing supplies, sir. Your unhappiness is my unhappiness. But I can only tell you again, I have delivered exactly what we received this morning.

He squinted into the wind. One of the youths wailed to him from the boat. But before he stepped into the tide, he touched his nose & leaned towards me.

MCGONIGLE: I advise you strongly to unbox the goods tonight.

MYSELF: What?

MCGONIGLE: Tonight, sir. Unpack the goods tonight. Before the gulls quite eat your pig away, sir.

I looked up the beach. The herring gulls were indeed tugging wildly where the meat hung loose.

MYSELF: In a month, I expect a full half-pig, Liam.

MCGONIGLE: I will make sure to pass on your words, sir. But unpack it tonight.

The islanders launched as I headed back up the rock, chasing gulls off the pork with the manifest. I believed I had the size of the matter, by which I mean the theft, but wanted to ensure my tools were intact, & then secure both the oats & the biscuits, as I have missed both sorely, & took my time getting around to the tarpaulins, my sight & hearing much reduced by hail. Odour I detected none; my nose is near bleached by the slant wind & constant exposure to fishy guano. Thus I failed to register the child or even the basket that bore it until the men had nigh passed the Organ Pipes.

But I could smell it indeed when I bent to examine the barrels. Even in the wind, sour as meat, the stench of human waste.

It made no discernible sound as I tugged off the tarpaulin. A wicker basket big enough for a live pig. At first, I thought I had found the side of beef gone rancid; but the weight of the basket shifted as it tilted; then I tugged the lid & knew not what I saw.

Two eyes met mine in the dark.

A face. A child.

A child blinking in the half-light.

Two wet eyes. A nest of hair.

MYSELF: Wait! Wait, you madmen! Wait.

MYSELF: Wait! It will die, you madmen! The child will die!

I ran towards the Organ Pipes, skidding, landing heavily off the lower ledge. Rose uninjured, shouting. The islander skiff was maybe three hundred yards out. Faces of the islandmen distant.

They made as if not to register me.

They saw me though. I know they did.

I was not done. Ran back to the basket, tugged it loose, heaved it to my chest & bore it on the rocks, tho it was heavy, & dropped it into my little rowboat, whereupon it toppled on its side & the lid slipped & the child rolled onto the shale screaming. Lifted it, tho it arched its back, into the darkening sky.

MYSELF: Take it back. I cannot take it. Take it back!

Waded in to my waist. Soaked my good green trousers, my boots wet thru, undergarments too. Shouted, at length, holding the child over the sea, a writhing thing, squealing, its apparel stinking.

The men had their backs to me now, & the boat disappeared behind the waves.

MYSELF: Take it back. It will die here. It will die!

My face & ears stung in the hail & the child’s most likely too, tho it gave up kicking & screaming to simply hang, until I stumbled back to the shore & dropped it to the shale.

The islanders were too far out.

In the waves & stormy dusk, with their sails up, I would not catch them in my little rowboat.

They have lumbered me with a thing that mewls on pebbles.

MYSELF: Get back in the basket. Get up. Into your basket.

MYSELF: Get in the basket! You are filthy.

No English in the child. It squealed on approach & on contact. All filth & frail wiriness. For humanity’s sake, I might have carried it in my arms, but the bloody thing seized like a board at my touch & writhed, & it proved altogether easier to just drop it back into its basket & carry it like goods.

Its basket now stands at my stove.

Must attend to deliveries. The gulls have picked thru my hasty rewrapping & are worrying my meat once again.

~

My supplies—or what I have of them—are secured.

The child has not moved.

Initially, it seemed entirely mute.

MYSELF: I must see to the deliveries. I must bind them before the gulls spoil them. (rattling the basket) If I do not go, I will lose the meat. You understand?

The child sobbed, mostly in silence, but yelped at the sight of my hands. So I unpacked my goods, first in hail, then in twilight by lamplight, as the sky cleared to a cosmic chill & Andromeda popped thru the clouds. First carried & hung the meat inside & the various perishables, then the pease & oatmeal, then two chests of tools behind my partition, then bound both dry goods & imperishables in sailcloth in the cabin’s lee. Could tell McGonigle had got back to Inishtrahull as his lighthouse began its repetitive scything across the shale & sea beyond Tor Mor. By the time all was secured, the wind had died & a fat full moon chipped the edge of a clear horizon.

The brandy—the single flask I have—is unwatered.

The biscuit coverings are unbroken.

Neither the butter nor the suet have spoiled.

All this time, the child lay silent in its box, by the stove, the fire on full blast, under the bubbling still. It—she, by the pinafore, she—must have been near roasted. The still gives a raging heat at full blast—I have coal enough for weeks, as it appears the Irish cannot eat coal—& the only shelter the child had was its rough & soiled wicker.

I heaved the basket to the door, naturally.

It—she, she—was silent the whole time & but for the heaviness & rapidity of breathing, I might have thought her dead.

MYSELF: You can come out here if you want to.

MYSELF: Come out. I will not hurt you. You can come out.

MYSELF: I am a good man. I am not unkind.

MYSELF: Are you not able to climb out? I will set the basket on its side.

Small yelps as I tilted the box, then nothing. At her continued silence, I peered into the depths, where she was coiled like a beast among her particulars, namely:

Clothing she wore;
a shitten, once white dress;
one blanket (utterly soiled);
one pair of wooden clogs;
one cracked chamber pot, once affixed to the base, now unmoored;
one rubber-bunged pewter flask.

The latter despite the age of the girl. Eight? Five? Twelve? I can age a puffin reliably to the season but with a human child could easily be off by four years, give or take. Malnourished, by the look of her, which makes the judgment harder. Just over my waist at full extension I would estimate, closer to four foot than three, skinny & dull of wit, lacking in vigour, filth-cauled & whimperish.

MYSELF: You can come out of the basket. I will not hurt you.

CHILD: Wishke.

This it croaked. Its first word: Wishke. Gaelic. Obviously there is opportunity for drollery—even Irish children clamour for whiskey etc—but from conversations with Frank, I know the word to mean water.

MYSELF: Water. You mean water, yes? Do you want a drink?

The child flinched as my hand neared. I took its—she, her—her bunged flask, a filthy receptacle possibly for use at sea or in prisons, & there was no strength in her hold on it. Filled it from the cooling tub by the still, returned it to the lip of her basket, & her little talons snatched it back.

Watched her drink. The matting of her hair almost total. Waste visible on the remains of what was clearly once a pretty outfit. What were once ribbons are now twisted & frayed.

MYSELF: Wishke. Wishke means water.

MYSELF: Do you want food?

MYSELF: Where is your mother, child?

Might as well have talked to a stone.

Dinner simple but wholesome. Boiled oats & sliced bacon shoulder. Have missed the bacon much. Must ration it carefully now. Oats too. Dregs of old lemon juice softened the meat & a tumbler of grog. Made a little extra. The child can eat with me one night. As I cooked, I tried to engage her. Box on its side. All I could make out from the shadows was greasy hair.

MYSELF: Grog? Do you want some grog?

MYSELF: Are you hungry? Do you want porridge?

CHILD: Wishke.

Refilled her bottle a second time, had it snatched again.

MYSELF: We will have dinner. We will eat. Food? I can feed you tonight.

MYSELF: Can you speak, child?

MYSELF: (chopping bacon finely) You can eat with me tonight. You are very welcome. Then, in the morning, I will take you back to the island. Do you understand? Back to your mother.

Not a flicker of comprehension, even at the word mother. But surely their Gaelic word must share some root with mater, mere, mutter? I have no idea.

She was entirely fixated on drinking.

Then I noted a puddle seeping from the basket over my boards.

MYSELF: No! No piss in here!

The child screamed as I dropped the knife & leapt to carry her & the dripping basket into the dark to the shale by the outhouse.

MYSELF: You do not piss in the cabin. Hear me? You do not piss in the cabin. Piss here. Piss out here. No piss in the cabin! Piss out here!

The child, distraught, keening. I thought of house-training hunting dogs, & rattled the basket, & shouted some more.

MYSELF: Do not piss in here. Children piss outside. We all piss outside. Everyone pisses outside! Not in the house.

Scrubbed the boards, & once her noise died down, carried the basket inside, dumped it by the stove. Set up table, added brandy to the oats, a sprinkle of sliced apple. Two bowls, two stools, & turned the basket so she would have to face me.

MYSELF: Come out of the basket now. It is time to eat.

MYSELF: Eat. Good food. The porridge is good.

MYSELF: Child! I will not bite you.

MYSELF: Child. Listen to me. I do not know if you can understand me, but it is only fair that I explain to you the situation. I will feed you & put you up for tonight & we will return you to your island in the morning. Whatever nonsense McGonigle is playing will be short-lived & I am sorry you are suffering but I am as much a victim in all of this as you. I do not know your full situation but I am here on vital scientific business & while I have all the sympathy in the world for the destitute, I cannot allow you or anyone else to interfere with my studies. I will take you home in the morning. So please, I ask you. Take my food. This is a strong & nourishing porridge. Eat it. It is good.

Not a word in her head. Perhaps she is dumb, or an idiot? When I proffered her a spoon, she sucked on her bottle instead.

MYSELF: Damn you so.

Am tired now from manual labour. Gin is a salve. This whole episode a pointless irritation. I must write to Sir Phillip immediately, outlining the loss of provisions as well as the islanders’ tomfoolery, & seal it definitively so as to make sure McGonigle cannot doctor the contents.

~

The child spoke as I was writing, but merely to ask for wishke, wishke! Like a wretch in an alley, she had crawled to the edge of her hutch, blinking in lamplight. For the first time I saw the face under her dank fringe, tear-streaks in mud, a moustache of puckered scabs.

Then, as I handed her the bottle, noted once again a thick stream of piss along the boards.

MYSELF: No! I told you! I told you!

Snatched her up, this time my hands in her hot armpits, regretting the closeness instantly as I bore her high & streaming out the door. She had pissed on my overalls, & where I had touched her, there was grime on my hands.

Bellowed at her, somewhat immodestly.

Then had to touch her again as I carried her wailing & dripping back to her box.

I have scoured the piss now, twice.

I can still smell it. The piss, & the whole child, despite the application of lime.

The situation is ridiculous. I had heard of such things in Barrackpore. Mothers prepared to risk the life of their offspring on the chance generosity of civilised men. More normally a man is protected by the trappings of civil society, his boy or domestic help interceding before the destitute can encroach. But never have I heard of a scientific expedition so disrupted.

It will not be without repercussions. McGonigle’s men have not only taken my provisions but now threatened my peace of mind. If Sir Phillip cannot guarantee adequate sustenance & appropriate intellectual solitude, the entire venture is imperilled; if further funds are required for the security of the next delivery, he needs but ask the Royal Society.

Have written him as much.

Field Notes from an Extinction
A Novel
By Eoghan Walls

LEARN MORE / PURCHASE THE BOOK

Fast-paced and funny. Scientific and tender. A literary thriller featuring Auks. As if Hilary Mantel’s The Giant, O’Brien met Robinson Crusoe, here is a story of one man’s growing humanity amidst famine and extinction.

Told in the vernacular of the day, this novel-as-notebook features a 19th-century ornithologist on a remote Irish island — from the author of indie favorite The Gospel of Orla.

“A unique and richly imagined novel.“
—Graeme Macrae Burnet, The New York Times Book Review

Written in the form of a 19th-century notebook of ornithological observations, Field Notes from an Extinction follows the life and work of one Ignatius Green, a fictitious English scientist dispatched by the Royal Society to the remote island of Tor Mor off the northern Irish coast. Green, a widower, is single-minded and self-righteous, brilliant and bumbling. He is determined to set the scientific record straight on the mating rituals, feeding and care of hatchlings,
and other minutiae he can gather about the Great Auk (pinguinus impennis).

Green’s world is shattered when his monthly goods delivery arrives ravaged by the local Irish townsmen. His fury at their impertinence is matched only by his dismay at finding a small child amid the shipment—dirty, abandoned, mute, and utterly feral and unmanageable. Worse, the locals are growing restless and hungry. And there is talk sweeping the land of a terrifying woman with unnatural power.

Green fights for his survival against brigands and hunger and, most fearsome, the resolve of a fierce and angry child. And, perhaps, for a wider understanding of family amidst roiling societal unrest.

My name is Hal Schrieve, and I’m a Seven Stories author and librarian. In addition to writing Young Adult fiction about queer teens, monsters, aliens, and evil cops, I have 8 years of experience working with books and the public. From 2017-2019, I worked doing library service at Rikers Island and bookmobile outreach at Queens Library. I was hired by NYPL as a children’s librarian in 2019. I stepped into a world of libraries dealing with consistent attacks on our institutional legitimacy. From book censorship fights in red states that have resulted in complete defunding of some local libraries^[1] to COVID closures that left service interrupted and forced a quick pivot to virtual programs and outdoor outreach,^[2] these have not been quiet years for libraries. In addition to being a political flashpoint, many public libraries’ budgets are, each year, up for debate, including in NYC. The biggest NYC library cuts occurred during The Great Recession in 2011, when a whopping 27% of the library’s budget across three systems was hacked away, leading to many branch closures and to staff shortages that lowered the level of services possible for the next decade. Cuts are back this year, which is why I am writing this post.

Despite Urban Librarians Unite, the unions, and the library system presidents testifying for the City Council each budget cycle about the need for library funding, a huge portion of each year’s library funding is always a bit of a question mark. Mostly, the library’s board and admin assume that funding will remain more or less stable — after all, libraries are vastly popular and are extremely useful at building social trust, as well as supplementing public education. But you can’t depend on precedent. In 2024, Eric Adams’ proposed budget cut $58 million from NYC libraries^[3] — which, at the time, amounted to something like 15% of the library budget. His claim at the time was that migrants were using up so much city funding that there was nothing left for everyone else. Meanwhile, the police got big robots that did nothing.^[4]

Last year, Mayor Zohran Mamdani made history by running a campaign that made big promises unapologetically, spoke in hard numbers, and responded to the concerns of working people, children, renters, parents, teachers, immigrants, and the homeless. I was a part of that campaign, but this didn’t make me special. Mamdani’s campaign, with its big commitments around childcare and housing, combined with a willingness to tax the richest New Yorkers to make a more functional city, enjoyed a practically unprecedented groundswell of support from grassroots canvassers. This should tell you about the direction of our political future. It was a beautiful thing. A million doors knocked takes a lot of people. My own contributions took the form of emphasizing, at about 1200 individual doors and on phone calls and zoom calls with people from my union, that Mamdani was going to fund the libraries. This wasn’t just an assumption on my part. Early in his campaign, Zohran promised city workers at union-specific town halls that he would commit to giving a baseline 1% of the budget to parks and 0.5% to libraries. These were percentages that city workers asked for specifically based on the experience of constant scarcity and precarity with previous budgets. A 0.1% increase in library funding means millions of dollars for full staffing, roof repairs, more storytimes, more tutoring, and more programs that help New Yorkers utilize our printers, computers, archives and databases. Other candidates also signed on to these pledges; when they dropped out, Mamdani kept mentioning those numbers. He last mentioned them in December: “We will not be doing a dance around something that we believe is critical to New Yorkers,” Mamdani said. “If there’s something we think is important, we will make that clear in our own preliminary.”^[5] I was really looking forward to the release of this budget. I didn’t vote for the dimples or charisma — I voted for a functional city. And a lot of other people did, too.

But Mamdani’s initial budget, released February 17, doesn’t keep his promise. Instead, it allocates $456 million to all three library systems — which sounds like a lot, but is just about 0.39% of the $127 billion budget, and in real dollars, over $20 million less than either the preliminary or the adopted budget of FY26.^[6] He’s speaking now in the language of deficits, though the precise amount of this deficit keeps changing, as it did under Adams’ austerity pleas. Obviously, he needs Hochul and the state to implement the broad income tax; equally obviously, unfunded state mandates require wrangling with more deficits.^[7] However, there are plenty of other sources of revenue besides our civic institutions. The police are still working with over $6 billion each year; my guess is that some of that funding is still going to the SRG that Mamdani committed to disband,^[8] or to large cars that will then be parked on sidewalks.^[9]

After the budget was restored under Adams after the push-pull,^[10] ULU, the DSA, abolitionist Mariame Kaba, and a huge number of patrons, librarians and library-lovers got together to try to figure out a plan to get politicians on board with establishing baseline library funding as a percentage of the city budget, so that large chunks of our operating budget could not be sporadically yanked away on the whim of an individual administration. The result was NYC PLAN, or NYC Public Library Action Network. They (we) were part of the pressure on the mayoral campaigns from the start. Now, they’re asking that people write to Mayor Mamdani to ask him to give libraries what he promised — a consistent percentage of the budget. They also have a convenient script to use to call your council member. I would invite you to do this, and also to attend a rally for libraries on March 21st.

During the budget season, seasoned policy wonks usually tell everyone to calm down— the money will be negotiated back after it’s been held over our heads for a while. However, as someone working at NYPL during the Adams budget tug-of-war, a massive proposed cut has real consequences. All libraries that had been open on Sunday closed for several months, hiring was frozen and planned repairs in Harlem were delayed, resulting in longer library closures. Other things, like expansions to after school tutoring, new computers, and about a third of new book acquisitions, were put on hold. All of these interruptions affect actual library use. You see it in the library when they stop buying new books; patrons noticed too when fewer copies of new bestsellers were available. We were loud; we spoke to patrons about it. Others also protested. These cuts were widely seen as unnecessary and harmful,^[11] particularly as they are a tiny chunk of change in the overall city budget. After several months of exhausting advocacy, they were mostly reversed. What could we have done with that time and energy if the cuts hadn’t been proposed to begin with?

In my time working for the public library systems, I have seen an awful lot of what is called (by librarians and city workers in other threatened institutions) “the budget dance.”^[12] I understand that Mamdani’s administration may believe that this initial budget doesn’t represent their final objective, and that it is therefore okay to use libraries to parlay with Hochul–after all, every other mayor has. But I think that, in New York City, one of the richest cities in America, and the world, our library institutions should not be regularly put on the chopping block while Wall Street brokers take home millions annually from fossil fuel destruction, AI data center expansion, and war. Our city deserves a budget that both focuses on the people here and cultivates education, civic life, and recreation for children, families, and new arrivals– for the millions of people that live here creating, learning and connecting. That is what makes NYC great.

1. https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/22/us/alabama-library-defunded-book-bans-hnk

2. https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/9974-new-york-public-libraries-adjust-pandemic-nyc/

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/11/nyregion/library-funding-cuts-eric-adams.html

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhH4uTMLyTA

5. https://nycplan.org/nycplan-newsletter-7/

6. https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2025/03/Libraries-1.pdf

7. https://newyork.edtrust.org/new-york-citys-1-billion-crisis-education-leaders-urge-pause-on-class-size-mandate/

8. https://www.wnyc.org/story/inside-the-nypd-unit-mayor-zohran-mamdani-wants-to-dismantle/

9. https://tribecacitizen.com/2024/08/16/taking-on-the-nypds-cars-on-sidewalks/

10. https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/06/27/budget-funding-adams-council-library-parks/

11. https://prismreports.org/2024/03/28/nyc-library-budget-cuts-impacting-most-vulnerable/

12. You can explore blog posts about “the budget dance” on Urban Librarians Unite’s website here, such as this post from 2012: https://urbanlibrariansunite.org/why-we-still-fight/

HAL SCHRIEVE is the author of Fawn’s Blood (2025), How to Get Over the End of the World (2023), and Out of Salem (2019), which was long-listed for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Hir indie comic Vivian’s Ghost was on the shortlist for Comics Beat’s 2023 Cartoonist Studio Prize Award for Best Webcomic, and was published in book form by Go Press Girl in 2024. Ze is a librarian.

To mark the publication of Ramzy Baroud’s Before the Flood: A Gaza Family Memoir, we’re proud to share Baroud’s introduction to the text, a history of Palestine told through a beautiful multigenerational narrative of the author’s family. In sharing such an account, Baroud offers a personal antidote to the dehumanizing nature of numbers and attention-grabbing headlines released by the media. For the past three years, we’ve watched from abroad, culpable in our complicity, as Israel has executed a genocide of the Palestinian people that is widely regarded to be one of the most visible and most documented atrocities of modern history. But this kind of documentation, while extremely important for historical record, can only do so much. As acquiring editor Greg Ruggiero writes: “We at Seven Stories approached Ramzy Baroud and invited him to describe what has been happening in Palestine through the stories of his family—how his relatives were pushed off their land, how they came to live in Gaza, and how they joined the collective fight to preserve Palestinian land, culture, and collective memory. The stories Baroud weaves invite readers to move beyond slogans and abstractions toward empathy, solidarity, and recognition of our shared humanity—the best long-term strategies against authoritarianism and the violence of organized forgetting.”

The Long History of Resistance: Introduction to Before the Flood by Ramzy Baroud

“One cannot give oneself courage if one does not have it.” This line comes from Alessandro Manzoni’s novel, The Betrothed. [1] It was uttered by Don Abbondio, a priest in the historical novel who courageously accepts his own cowardice.

Indeed, courage is not given. Like sacrifice, faith, camaraderie, community, resilience, even love itself, courage is an organic process that is innately formulated, often by circumstances beyond our reach. Collectively, such complex social structures could take many generations in the making, a process of which we are hardly cognizant.

Some traditional historians—who continue to subscribe to the methods of histoire événementielle, or event history—tend to ignore the remarkable effect of historical phenomena that often, over the course of many years or even centuries, impact our collective behavior. In his foreword to this book, Ilan Pappé references longue durée, the long-term consequences of history, a concept crafted by the founders and disciples of the French Annales School. [2]

Credible history can only be seen in its totality, not merely as the total events of history, recent or old, but as the sum of feelings; the culmination of ideas; the evolution of collective consciousness, identities, and relationships; and the subtle changes occurring in societies over the course of time. Palestinians are the perfect example of history being shaped by ideas, not guns; memories, not politics, collective hope, or international relations. The Palestinian people will eventually win their freedom because they have invested in a long-term trajectory of ideas, memories, and communal aspirations, which often translate to spirituality, a deep, immovable faith that grows stronger, even during times of genocide.

In my 2020 interview with the former United Nations Special Rapporteur, Professor Richard Falk, he summarized the struggle in Palestine as a war between those with arms against those with legitimacy. He said that in the context of national liberation movements, there are two kinds of war: the actual war, as in soldiers carrying guns, and the war for legitimacy. The one who wins the latter will ultimately prevail. [3]

Was it the knowledge of such an irreversible historical truth that led the Israeli historian Benny Morris to express his growing sense of pessimism about his country’s future? “The Palestinians look at everything from a broad, long-term perspective,” he said in an interview with the newspaper Haaretz in 2019. “They see that at the moment, there are five-six-seven million Jews here, surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs. They have no reason to give in, because the Jewish state can’t last. They are bound to win. In another thirty to fifty years, they will overcome us, come what may.” [4]

Morris is right: Palestinians will not give up. There can never be a situation where societies indefinitely survive and thrive based on a permanent system of racial apartheid, violence, and exclusion. The very history of Palestine — which I highlight in this book using people’s history and personalized narratives — is a testament to such a truth. If the oppressed, the Indigenous of the land, are not fully vanquished, they will rise, resist, fight, and win back their freedom, thus eventually winning the legitimacy war. Morris is right again when he indicates that Palestinian people collectively “look at everything from a broad, long-term perspective.” Agreeing with his argument may seem odd: societies are often fragmented by class struggles and competing socioeconomic agendas instead of unified by solidarity and a cohesive long-term collective vision. This is where longue durée becomes relevant in the Palestinian case. Even if Palestinians have not made a common agreement to wait for the invaders to leave, or for Palestine to once again become a place of social, racial, and religious coexistence, they are driven, even if subconsciously, by the same energy that compelled their ancestors to push back against the invaders. Characters in this book fulfill the historical role that was assigned to them by circumstances beyond their control. They are reanimating the past, just as their descendants will shape the future.

While many Western politicians today characterize Palestinian people as “terrorists,” blaming victims for resisting their own oppression, Palestinian society continues to evolve based on entirely independent dynamics. For example, the culture of Muqawama — Resistance — is deeply ingrained in Palestine. It is a culture as old as time. Innate. Intuitive. Intergenerational. It precedes the birth of Israel by thousands of years. Batis put it to the test when he led Gaza in legendary battles against the Macedonian invasion fomented by Alexander the Great in 332 BC. Batis may seem to be a footnote in this book, but, in fact, if read carefully, you will discover that he is the central character. He is the Zaher al-Umar al-Zaydani, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam, the Ghassan Kanafani, and Ehab al-Badrasawi, around whom this story is centered. The deep-rooted historical continuum between the Palestinian past, present, and future is the very essence of this book.

Before the Flood speaks of many things and many people, but ultimately it is about a branch of my family that has chosen to write — with their blood — a chapter in the unending Palestinian saga, demonstrating that history is not moved just by short-term events, but by countless factors. While in-the-moment events are important, longue durée provides a more profound understanding of our collective trajectory. Longue durée is concerned with historical shifts and changes that are situated within the realm of notions, ideas, collective perceptions, identities, and feelings, like courage and self-sacrifice for the sake of the group. These are the kinds of feelings that “one cannot give oneself . . . if one does not have.”

The anti-fascist intellectual Antonio Gramsci spoke about the importance of culture as a driver of history and meaning. “Culture isn’t having a well-stocked warehouse of news but is the ability that our mind has to understand life, the place we hold there, our relationship with other people. Those who are aware of themselves and of everything, who feel the relationship with all other beings.” [5] For a writer, these relationships fall under the concept of positionality, as in the relationship between the intellectual and their position, and how their position relates to the subject matter. This useful tool has given historians, especially those from the Global South, the power to navigate the painful terrain of our own victimization and long histories of oppression.

In this and all of my previous books, I have attempted to slowly liberate the Palestinian narrative from the convenient histories imposed on my people. It is not an easy task, but an unavoidable one. This book is my latest, and hopefully best, attempt at freeing Palestine from the confines of superimposed language, historical events, recurring dates, dehumanizing statistics, and outright deception. Here, I try to place the Palestinian narrative in entirely different intellectual and historical frameworks, where only truly representative Palestinian voices are centered. I try to prove that the seemingly weak and dispensable peasants, laborers, and workers — the fellahin — are the most influential actors in the story of Palestine, past and present, and that while AI, drones, fighter jets, and bunker-buster bombs may impact short-term events, courage, faith, and communal love will determine long-term history.

As you continue reading this, I hope that you will understand why Palestinians are not history’s passive victims, but, over the course of generations, its masters—the ones who shape it and the future as well.

Many characters began their relationship with this narrative as storytellers or researchers, but soon became victims of the Israelis’ genocide, thus becoming the story. When one of those storytellers was killed, another seamlessly continued where they left off — a wife telling the story of her husband, the son of his father, the sister of her brother. Without prior coordination, they shaped the narrative with no gaps or interruptions. This achievement is not my own. It is theirs.

As I continued to write, my position went beyond storyteller into something else entirely, at times gory and frightening, deeply emotional and raw. When the genocidal war started on October 7, 2023, whole branches of my family perished in large numbers. Scores of my cousins, their wives, husbands, and children, died under the rubble of their homes in the most horrific and unimaginable ways. Some were burned alive. Others were shot by snipers. A few were executed while taking refuge at hospitals or standing in line in UN feeding centers, hoping to fetch a loaf of bread.

The images on this book’s cover attempt to honor some of the faces of those lost in the genocide. But no single cover could ever contain all the innocent lives that were extinguished. Even if such a space existed, entire families have been obliterated — burned away with their photo albums. And yet, their beautiful faces, their warmth, and their stories remain etched in our hearts forever.

The photographs chosen here are intimately tied to the lives portrayed in this book — including Ehab, the central character, and members of his immediate al-Badrasawi family, who were killed in harrowing succession, one after the other, before his own death and continuing still. Among them is my sister Soma, the beloved doctor of Khan Younis. Her murder is not only a tragedy — it is a rupture that runs through the very center of my family’s story, marking even the chapters yet unwritten, for generations to come.

As I turned to my final task of writing the introduction, I wanted to situate the book in what I believe to be the proper historical context. I have always argued that it was not the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that injected my people into the world’s historical discourse; it was not Israel that made us relevant by ethnically cleansing the Palestinians in 1948. But I struggled to define the single most critical event in our history, if any existed, that could serve as the starting point of our historical trajectory. This is when my sister Soma, one of Gaza’s most beloved medical doctors, was assassinated by the Israeli army on October 9, 2024, while on her way back from Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis. I say assassinated because she was the 166th doctor and 987th medical worker to be deliberately killed by Israel up to that date, part of the Israeli plan to annex our land and dismantle all aspects of Palestinian life and societal continuity.

After days of mourning, it dawned on me that Soma, in her beauty, cleverness, wisdom, patience, and, yes, courage and sacrifice, had always represented the single moment that demarcated the history of our people. Soma, or the representation of all the Somas of our history — including the history yet to be written — gives us meaning, inspires us, and grants us hope and courage.

Benny Morris, a devout Zionist himself, is right to observe that “Palestinians look at everything from a broad, long-term perspective.” Indeed, we do, even if, at times, we are not aware of it. Perhaps this lack of constant awareness allows us to continue for generations on the long collective journey to defend our historical home and freedom.

1. Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed (London: R. Bentley, 1834). Digitized by Harvard University, April 27, 2006.

2. “Longue durée.” Oxford Reference. www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/ authority.20110803100114325.

3. Palestine Chronicle TV. “Speaking to Professor Richard Falk: On Palestine, Israel and International Law.” YouTube video. Posted September 22, 2020. www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMtVONP3_co.

4. Ofer Aderet, “‘Israel Will Decline, and Jews Will Be a Persecuted Minority. Those Who Can Will Flee to America’,” Haaretz, January 22, 2019, https://www.haaretz. com/us-news/2019-01-22/ty-article-magazine/.premium/israel-will-decline-and-jews-will-be-persecuted-those-who-can-will-flee/0000017f-e552-d9aa-afff-fd5a159f0000.

5. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971).

Recommended Reading

1. Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, edited by Edmund Ghareeb and Naseer Aruri

2. Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler-Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle by Omar Zahzah

3. Sumūd: A New Palestinian Reader, edited by Malu Halasa and Jordan Elgrably

4. A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine by Chris Hedges

5. Hamas: From Resistance to Regime by Paola Caridi, translated by Andrea Teti

Before the Flood

A Gaza Family Memoir Across Three Generations of Colonial Invasion, Occupation, and War in Palestine
By Ramzy Baroud

The social, political, and historical context of the Israeli war on Palestine told through the stories of the author’s family and village.

“Deeply researched and highly readable, Before the Flood is a must read, leading to action and protest.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

A profound exploration of Palestinian history and resilience through the personal stories of the author’s family—the al-Badrasawis. Beginning with intimate details of village life in Beit Daras prior to the Nakba, Ramzy Baroud vividly portrays the rich cultural heritage, deeply rooted traditions, and daily struggles faced by ordinary people whose lives were radically disrupted by the violent upheavals and ongoing conflicts driven by British colonialism and Zionist aggression.

Baroud weaves together past and present, illuminating how historical forces shaped the collective consciousness and steadfast resilience of the Palestinian people. His storytelling reveals not only the harsh realities of occupation, displacement, and loss but also the extraordinary courage, faith, and solidarity that underpin a powerful and enduring spirit of resistance, encapsulated in what the author refers to as the Palestinian “longue durée.” Ultimately, Baroud aims to humanize and reclaim Palestinian narratives from distorted portrayals, highlighting their perseverance and the universal quest for justice and liberation.

RAMZY BAROUD is a Palestinian author, historian, and academic whose work focuses on Palestinian history, liberation, and people’s history. His books include Searching Jenin, The Second Palestinian Intifada, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, The Last Earth, and These Chains Will Be Broken. His book, Our Vision for Liberation, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, brings together voices shaping the Palestinian struggle today. Baroud holds a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and has taught mass communication at Curtin University. He is a Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at Istanbul Zaim University. His academic contributions extend to numerous books and journals, and he has lectured at leading universities worldwide. His work has been translated into multiple languages, solidifying his role as a key voice in documenting Palestinian history and resistance.

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To celebrate last month’s publication of Movements that Win, a new book by noted activist and radical writer-agitator Aric McBay, we’re proud to share McBay’s afterword, in which he explores the different tactical patterns he observed while conducting research for the book. In Movements that Win, Aric McBay offers a variety of paths forward, all based on the achievements of past actions and movements. If we need anything at this moment of increasing fascism and authoritarianism—both globally and domestically—we need concrete examples of victories and clear analysis of what made those victories possible, so we, too, can be victorious. While reading this text, consider the ways in which your organizing work embodies these patterns, and, if it doesn’t, the ways in which you may further implement the forward-thinking ideas presented in text.

LEARN MORE / PURCHASE THE BOOK

Patterns of Resistance

Writing Movements that Win has been a source of joy and optimism for me. Although I’ve been involved in movements since I was a teenager, while researching this book, I found new stories that will nourish and inspire me for years to come.

As a reader, I hope you have also found new reasons for optimism in these pages. I hope your spirits have been lifted and you can see new avenues for action.

Some stories in this book were surprising to me. However, despite the variety and diversity of these examples, I have repeatedly found the same patterns behind movements that win.

Writing this book has strengthened some of my core beliefs about how social movements make change — in particular, the need for direct action, coalitions across differences, and the importance of building movement capacity at the grassroots level. I found twelve key patterns in these stories. For simplicity and coherence, I’ll place these twelve patterns into three groups: purpose, action, and organization:

PURPOSE:

1. A Tangible Common Goal

2. Positive Vision

3. Urgency (Imminence/Emergency)

4. A Common Enemy

ACTION:

1. Initiative and Escalation

2. Disruption and Direct Action

3. A Common Tactic and Collective Action

4. Diversity of Tactics and Radical Flanking

ORGANIZATION:

1. Coalitions Across Difference

2. Movement Capacity

3. Participatory Decision-Making and Democracy

4. Persistence and Endurance

Let’s begin with purpose. Our first four patterns all have to do with the goals and context of a movement. What do they want to achieve, and what environment are they operating in?

1. A TANGIBLE COMMON GOAL

In all these stories, community members and activists from different backgrounds had to rally together around a tangible common goal. They wanted to accomplish something specific and were able to do it together.

When Revolution of the Heart convened, its goal was clear: removing a specific colonial statue. That clarity and the ability to organize at a specific location were essential to its success.

Likewise, the struggle against the Richmond Dump was about a specific piece of land and community. There were particular people, wells, and wildlife being adversely affected by the dump. That made it easy to focus efforts on the problem’s source and organize and unify community efforts.

The same was true for the campaigns around Parcel C, the Green Bans, the Wyhl Reactor Site, and many others.

All these groups could have chosen more abstract or diffuse goals. The Revolution of the Heart could have chosen to focus on “colonialism” in general, but that kind of vague, amorphous system is much harder to rally around.

Likewise, the Richmond Dump organizers could have focused on opposing the concept of waste in general—but would 90 percent of their neighbors have signed a petition against “waste”? It’s very difficult to mobilize people to fight an abstraction.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t oppose harmful systems or name them as things we want to change—to the contrary. However, if we’re aiming to change big and abstract systems, we need to find intermediate goals and stepping stones that will let us achieve wins and build momentum.

2. POSITIVE VISION

While many of the stories in this book were oppositional, at least in part, successful movements were also guided by a positive vision of what they wanted to create or protect.

Parcel C organizers didn’t just want to stop a parking garage; they wanted a community center for Boston Chinatown.

The radical unionists of the Green Bans wanted to protect specific neighborhoods and places. But they also wanted to forge an intersectional working-class movement in which unions also fought racism, homophobia, and imperialism. They wanted to build a “socialist world with a human face, an ecological heart, and an egalitarian body.”

Many Indigenous-led movements discussed—like the Wet’suwet’en struggle or the Revolution of the Heart—were about more than Indigenous survival; they were about reshaping the larger society to become more just and self-aware.

Indeed, sometimes the method of opposition created the positive model needed—like how the camp opposed to the Wyhl nuclear reactor created its own “college” and eventually became a nature reserve.

A clear, positive vision allows us to be more strategic and use our limited resources as community activists. It guides us, gives us a direction to move toward, and motivates and sustains organizers and supporters. Few people want to participate in a social movement if the only options are different kinds of defeat or if struggle only prolongs the inevitable.

People need a positive, transformative vision of a future worth living in. Now, especially.

3. URGENCY

Just because a problem exists doesn’t mean people will act against it. Something needs to motivate people to get involved rather than wait for someone else to solve the problem. There must be some reason to set aside business as usual so that people go to the streets instead of staying home and watching Netflix.

Often, that reason is urgency. People respond much more actively to the threat of imminent harm than to something that may be a problem one day.

There’s a reason activists have reframed climate change as a climate “emergency.” Climate change is notoriously difficult to organize against because it can feel so nebulous and distant.

The environmental justice wins described in this book are tied to specific, tangible plans and specific, urgent threats. The Brent Spar was on the verge of being sunk. Doug Ford’s gas plants were within weeks or days of being approved. The Richmond Dump was an active and growing threat to groundwater.

4. A COMMON ENEMY

Rallying people from different backgrounds around a joint campaign isn’t easy. A tangible goal helps, and so does an emergency.

But one particular thing helps people put aside their differences: a common enemy.

In the struggles against the Northern Gateway and Line 9 pipelines, that common enemy was fossil fuel giant Enbridge. It’s often a corporation, whether Unocal at Umbergaon, Waste Management at the Richmond Dump, or Walmart . . . everywhere.

Other times, the common enemy is the government: the German government in the struggle at Wyhl or the UK government in the case of the movement for nuclear disarmament.

Governments, though, can be sprawling. It’s best to put pressure on specific figures and decision-makers whenever possible. Opponents of the Brent Spar painted Prime Minister John Major as a “redundant rig” to be dumped. Organizers of the 504 Disability Sit-ins focused much of their effort on Joseph Califano, the federal secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.

That’s the last pattern in the purpose and context group. Next, let’s look at four more patterns: those of action.

5. INITIATIVE AND ESCALATION

In these stories (and in the wider world!), we see again and again that officials in corporations and government funnel dissent into bureaucratic or technical channels where community power can be controlled and dominated.

The United States government stalled the implementation of the disability rights measures in Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 by starting another review of regulations. Opponents of Line 9, the Richmond Dump, and the proposed nuclear waste dump spent years engaging in technical and bureaucratic reviews.

The City of Kingston tried to direct opposition to a colonial statue into a committee discussion about how the wording of a plaque might be adjusted.

Eventually, though, activists broke from those systems, seized the initiative, and went outside official challenges to do something bold and challenging. Activists kept their eyes on the prize, focusing on the specific tangible outcomes they wanted to achieve so they could avoid being derailed by a bureaucratic process that was meant to stifle them.

Sometimes this meant escalating the struggle, raising the stakes. Site occupations or sit-ins (like Revolution of the Heart, the Brent Spar, Wyhl reactor site, and the 504 disability sit-ins) were all meant to escalate the struggle and keep it from being ignored. They also created a sense of urgency that people could rally around to crystallize abstract issues into clear and tangible problems to be confronted.

Smart groups can also take the initiative by being proactive or preemptive. Al Norman’s ultimate advice to stop corporations like Walmart was to put in place zoning bylaws that would explicitly pan big-box stores, avoiding the need for a site fight altogether. The struggle against the Energy East pipeline was likewise successful because of its willingness to preempt the bureaucratic hearing of the National Energy Boards with disruption and direct action.

6. DISRUPTION AND DIRECT ACTION

Disruption and direct action are among the most powerful tools we have as movement workers. In so many campaigns, our worst enemy is business as usual. Business as usual means the constant march of gentrification, corporatization, and growing inequality (as with the Green Bans, Parcel C, and the struggle against Walmart).

Business as usual also means the gradual accumulation of a threat that could eventually become catastrophic, as with climate change or nuclear war.

Direct actions such as sit-ins, strikes, and blockades provide powerful tools to disrupt or stop business as usual.

Disrupting business as usual has many benefits. One is that it creates a strategic dilemma that those in power feel pressure to resolve. Recall how the Revolution of the Heart was able to get a quick response in part because city hall didn’t know how to manage them or control such a bold action.

Direct action like the rail blockades of Shut Down Canada can create a strong economic cost that corporations and governments can’t tolerate. The same was the case for the Brent Spar struggle, which combined both an occupation and boycotts to produce a high economic and political cost for those in power.

The bureaucratic management of dissent—through hearings or courts—is meant to put activists on a field of struggle that is rigged in favor of big corporations and colonial governments. It is meant to put us on a plane of conflict where we are at a disadvantage.

The benefits of direct action—and taking the initiative—are that we get to decide where conflict happens. We leverage the power of asymmetry. We choose a place where those in power are weak and we are strong. We get more control of the narrative.

7. A COMMON TACTIC AND COLLECTIVE ACTION

Movements that win use collective action of some kind. Individual actions alone—even good actions like buying fair trade coffee or flying less—cannot overturn entrenched systems of power. The boycotts against Shell, marches of the nuclear-disarmament movement, and the construction bans in Sydney were all examples of common tactics that brought together people from many backgrounds to pursue a common cause.

But that’s not the only way to do things. Indeed, collective action can be even more powerful when it involves many kinds of action at once.

8. DIVERSITY OF TACTICS AND RADICAL FLANKING

The most powerful movements use many tactics simultaneously—from petitions to legal challenges to direct action. This maximizes the impact by encouraging many different people to participate in the way that best suits them, using their particular gifts and skills at a risk level they feel comfortable with.

Sometimes, groups diversify their tactics because of the failure or shortcomings of a broader movement, as with the Committee of 100 and the Spies for Peace (and, to some extent, Energy East). Ideally, a strategy of diverse tactics is intentional, as with the 504 disability sit-ins.

Smart use of diverse tactics can also strengthen a movement through radical flanking, as we saw in the struggles against the Richmond Dump and the nuclear waste dump in South Australia.

Radical flanking at work during Revolution of the Heart’s effort to remove the statue of John A Macdonald. Kingston officials had ignored requests to take down the offensive statue for years. However, the escalation of direct action meant that a negotiated removal of the statue was suddenly the most appealing option, especially after the toppling and destruction of colonial statues in other cities.

9. COALITIONS ACROSS DIFFERENCE

To generate the political strength needed to create substantive change, movements that win create powerful coalitions across differences.

The Green Bans were not only a struggle to preserve green space but also for working-class neighborhoods and the rights of women, Indigenous People, and queer people.

Opponents of Doug Ford’s gas plants were able to rally students and seniors, Indigenous people and farmers, climate justice advocates and public health experts. The struggle to salvage Parcel C for Chinatown likewise rallied not only the community but lawyers, healthcare advocates, and Quakers.

This ability to organize across differences is critical. Bridge-builders who convene supporters from diverse communities can, of course, increase the number of people and resources involved. However, they also bring together new perspectives that boost a movement’s strategic capacity.

The organizers of the 504 disability sit-ins would not have succeeded without the solidarity they cultivated to bring together disability rights activists along with Black Panthers, unionists, queer organizers, and the United Farm Workers.

Such alliances can open new possibilities for transformative action and dramatically increase a campaign’s overall capacity. Indeed, along with a diversity of tactics, cooperation between allied groups is essential to building healthy and strong ecologies of struggle.

10. MOVEMENT CAPACITY

Effective organizers must consider the specific capacities needed to reach their goals. Capacities like recruitment, communications, security, and logistics.

My book Full Spectrum Resistance was structured with a chapter for each of these important capacities, asking: “How do you recruit the people you need and keep them? How do you organize into groups that can cooperate and get things done? How do you moderate internal conflict? How do you reach out to new allies and supporters? How do you protect yourselves and your comrades from repression? How do you gather the intelligence you need to choose good targets? How do you work out the strategy and tactics you need to mobilize force in a rapidly changing political conflict? And how have movements of the past done these things?”

All movements need strategy and tactics. Movements must reach large numbers of people—like campaigns for Nuclear Disarmament—and more strongly develop their communications capacity. Groups that take on bigger risks—like the Spies for Peace or the Green Ban organizers—must build their skills in security and counterintelligence. And organizations that want to organize difficult or prolonged occupations—like those of the Brent Spar or the Wyhl Reactor Site—must master logistics if they want to win.

It’s also important to look at building not just single campaigns, but enduring and intersectional movements. When we build successful movements, we can make transformative changes on a much larger and more lasting scale than any one campaign.

11. PARTICIPATORY DECISION-MAKING AND DEMOCRACY

Each victory described in this book involved democratic decision-making in how activists organized themselves and wanted society to function.

When I spoke to Hereditary Chief Na’Moks of the Wet’suwet’en, I asked him what he ultimately wanted to attain. “Democracy,” he told me.

Remember the story of the Green Bans? When the suburban women in Hunter’s Hill wanted help from the builder’s union, the union agreed to help on the condition that the residents vote in favor of a green ban.

The campaign around Parcel C converged on a people’s referendum and was meant to capture the collective wishes of Boston Chinatown.

The petition gathered by opponents to the Richmond Dump—boasting signatures from 90 percent of residents—showed the democratic will of the community.

Operating in a democratic and participatory way is a means of building strong movements and strategic capacity.

In contrast, some movements mentioned suffered greatly from a lack of democracy. The early anti-nuclear movement in the UK was stymied in part by the paternalistic approach of Canon Collins. The potential of the Green Bans was ultimately thwarted by the hierarchy of Gallagher and the national union.

12. PERSISTENCE AND ENDURANCE

Movements that win are movements that last. In his book The Strategy of Social Protest, William Gamson argues that social movements that can last until a broad societal crisis are likely to achieve their goals. Movements need persistence for many reasons. One is that building relationships—building movements—takes a lot of time. This book includes several examples of movements that won quickly. Revolution of the Heart reached its goal after only ten days of action, while some of our municipal campaigns against Ford’s gas plants lasted less than a week.

But those efforts succeeded because they were the manifestation of many years of groundwork and relied on relationships and networks that had already been cultivated.

Building movements and making change isn’t easy. There are times, though, when it’s easier. A movement that can endure will eventually find opportunities that it can be ready to seize.

If the movement organizers are strategic, they’ll have used that time to strengthen relationships, gather resources, and develop shared skills.

In other cases, movements don’t need to wait for an opportunity so much as they need to outlast their opponent.

Many of the places protected by the Green Bans still exist today, in part because organizers were able to endure until the economic circumstances driving development had changed.

Even the win against Energy East resulted from delaying the process until that pipeline was no longer economically feasible.

I want to make an important caveat: Persistence is essential, but it doesn’t win campaigns. If doing the same thing for six months doesn’t lead to progress, doing the same thing over and over for six years is unlikely to be an improvement.

Endurance is valuable because of what we do with our time: grow our numbers, make alliances, learn new skills, try new tactics.

If we want to last in the long haul, however, we also need to think about how to retain people. What makes movement workers want to stick around? What makes them feel invested and have a stake in decision-making? How do we build a track record of wins that encourages people?

This quality, persistence, is in some way the result of all the other qualities combined. The ability to endure isn’t just a matter of willpower—it’s also a result of making many good strategic decisions along the way.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

A nice, tidy novel can end in a nice, tidy way—resolve the major conflict, wrap up loose threads, and send the satisfied reader on their way. This is not that kind of book. We do not live in a novel. The real world is messy, and there is much work to be done. There are many reasons movement workers are unsatisfied.

So, let me conclude this book with a challenge: Let this not be the end. Help the stories, patterns, and victories in this book live beyond these pages.

If you haven’t already, gather your friends and comrades to discuss and learn from the victories that inspire you. Don’t just learn from the history of whatever movements you work in—learn from other struggles to cross-pollinate and invigorate your work.

Together, we can forge more intersectional and effective movements, building a better, more just, and more liveable future for all.

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An inspiring collection of true stories about brave people who organize, fight back, and prevail against corporate greed and government injustice, to learn from the tactics of how they won.

As the world slides further toward authoritarianism and the prospects for advancing social justice through electoral democracy narrow, the power of communities to prevail against strongman politics and corporate domination becomes increasingly crucial. In Movements That Win, long-time activist Aric McBay urges readers to remain hopeful, connected, vocal, and strong. He champions the creative innovations, bravery, and persistence of those who take risks to organize their communities to confront injustices imposed on them in the name of greed, militarism, and racism.

Building on the analysis presented in his two-volume set, Full Spectrum Resistance, McBay showcases a wide range of attainable victories — wins we can and should emulate through solidarity and direct action. Along the way, McBay provides boots-on-the-ground insights into the key factors that inspire people to join local movements, how to persevere during backlash and repression, and how to build momentum through small victories.

It’s oh-so-cold out, and much of the news right now isn’t making it feel any warmer. We at Seven Stories have some recommendations to occupy your minds and hearts during this long and frigid stretch of the year. —Eden

Allison (Web Manager)

Love Junkie by Robert Plunket

Historically, I’m not great at reading for fun during times of political strife, and this most recent iteration of state-orchestrated brutality seems to offer no exception to that trend. When confronted with the fascist creep, my brain prefers to doomscroll and plug in IRL rather than pick up a book. But I’m trying to force myself to actually give my brain and nervous system a break from the constant horror, so I’ve begun re-reading one of my favorite books of all time: Love Junkie by Robert Plunket. It’s a perfect novel. A masterpiece, really. A Westchester, NY housewife with grand cultural aspirations and just the right amount of self-delusion finds herself acquainted with a group of very chic and lightly scammy (complimentary) art world gay men, and resolves to ingratiate herself in their inner circle no matter what the cost. A tale as old as time. Naturally, hijinks ensue. It’s a real delight.

Claire (Marketing Director)

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade

I’ve been having fun reading biographies lately. I’ve been a member of Lauren Goldenberg‘s wonderful Woman Biographies book club since it started in 2020 when we read Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art by Mary Gabriel, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman, and Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade for our first few books. Now Lauren is taking it in person for those in New York to McNally Jackson’s book club offerings. We’re currently reading Francesca Wade’s latest, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife.

Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker by Zachary Leader

I also couldn’t resist picking up Zachary Leader’s biography of a biographer at Winter Institute last year. Maude Ellmann, daughter of Richard Ellmann, was my professor and thesis advisor at Notre Dame and she taught a whole class on Ulysses. I recommend the book Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker published by Harvard University Press. It’s dense but rewarding because it is an account of how Joyce’s most influential biography came to be and its meticulousness mirrors Ellmann’s own.

If Books Could Kill hosted by Peter Samshiri and Michael Hobbes

In terms of podcasts, one of my favorites is If Books Could Kill hosted by Peter Shamshiri and Michael Hobbes. There’s something cathartic about listening to it after working in marketing in the book publishing industry for 18 years. They recently did a two part episode on Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk that reminded me a lot of the conclusions and warnings in our Seven Stories Press critical graphic novel, Elon Musk: American Oligarch by Darryl Cunningham.

Magic Mountain Talks

And last but not least, I am a co-organizer of an exciting new monthly conversation series in Boulder, Colorado. It’s called Magic Mountain Talks and it’s held at one of my favorite bookstores, Trident Booksellers & Cafe, which is worker owned and run. Check out our lineup —we kicked things off with Rachel Kushner last week and Perry Anderson, Tony Tulathimutte, Alyssa Battistoni, Paul Reitter, Jeff Sharlet are coming up and — breaking news— Fred Moten just confirmed for October! Be sure to register online (it’s free) but space is limited.

Eden (Senior Intern)

Salvage by Hedgie Choi

I bought Hedgie Choi’s Salvage a bit mindlessly, after reading a couple of her poems online. I was not prepared for the irreverent awesomeness that is this debut poetry book, written with a mixture of disdain and wit and sincerity. On display are Choi’s amoral furies, like her thoughts upon seeing roadkill deer— “that’s exactly what / those // soft and gentle / fuckers // deserve.”—and her existential disappointments—“I know other people are real, don’t / remind me.” Don’t be fooled: this is an inherently optimistic book. Choi doesn’t wince at the impurities and uncertainties that make us actual human beings. Precariousness is the whole point, as she writes in a later poem: “This is a moment when one clean spoon / could enter my life and change it.” I think Hedgie Choi is the clean spoon that entered my life. I’m a little happier for it.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams directed by Werner Herzog

Featuring 30,000 year old cave paintings, Werner Herzog getting progressively creeped out by early human expressionism, and a keenly-nosed French scientist who literally sniffs the hills searching for cave openings. Maybe a perfect documentary?

Eric (Publisher of Two Dollar Radio)

_9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9

I’m into found media, strange happenings, and creepy stories around found media, I guess. I’m a child of the ‘90s and drank the X Files Kool-Aid, for sure. Several years ago I became mildly obsessed with “_9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9,” where someone traced what appeared to be a random Reddit comment on a discussion about the cover design for George Orwell’s 1984 back to its source, and realized the user — _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 — was posting similar fragmentary comments all over various discussion boards, and when pasted together the comments formed a creepypasta story. The story is about mind control and time travel, and incorporates real historical events, like ancient Hungarian noblewoman serial killers, the Manson murders, and the space race. It’s wild.

“What’s inside this crater in Madagascar” by Vox

A tamer relative of that, are some of the videos that Vox has produced, where they try to discover the truth behind strange, natural phenomena. Here’s one they did trying to figure out who was living in the middle of a crater in Madagascar, and another where they attempt to discover the truth behind strange circles in the Sahara.

Found Audio by N.J. Campbell

And if any of that sounds intriguing, I’d recommend N.J. Campbell’s novel, Found Audio, about an audio analyst who is able to pick out minute details from audio recordings. A mysterious man shows up at her university office one day, asking her to analyze three audio cassettes, his only instruction being to not make a copy. However, the analyst is so perplexed by what she hears, that she creates a transcription, which is the deposition of an adventure journalist, and his lifelong pursuit of a “City of Dreams,” which may or may not exist, but he keeps hearing about, from the walled city of Kowloon, to the Louisiana bayou, to the Singing Dunes of Mongolia.

Ho Ying (Special Projects Manager)

Song of the City directed by David C. Roberts

It’s an objective fact that New York City was at its coolest before you arrived. The Dutch missed out on all the best Lenape bands, Bob Dylan never got to eat at that place in Little Syria (great sea urchin ceviche), and I was born too late to see Blondie at CBGB’s. Song of My City (available to stream) is a 17 minute short film put together using b-roll of NYC street scenes from 1970s movies, and it’s the next best thing to getting mugged in the subway by a gang of baseball-playing mimes.

Lou (Web and Marketing Assistant)

Asher White, 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living (2025)

I’ve spent the grayest days of winter listening to Asher White’s excellent album 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living. White knows how to write a really excellent indie rock song, which makes the moments when this album slides into sonic chaos even more exciting. A must-listen for looking out the window of an El train car that reeks of cigarettes.

Luis (Senior Intern)

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

I was recommended Anna Karenina for years, and now, as I approach the end of the novel, I regret having waited so long to finally give it a chance. It’s a gorgeously written love story that asks who is justified in vengeance and whether one’s happiness is worth another’s. I’ve been told you root for different characters every time you read Anna Karenina, so I am excited to see whose side I’m on during my next read. This edition is more than a thousand pages long, so I’ll check in a few years…

Maddy (Production Editor)

Pitch Dark by Renata Adler

I read Speedboat about a month ago and became absolutely infatuated with Adler’s take on the novel. Just as funny and intelligent and attuned to the minutiae of modern life as Speedboat, Pitch Dark is also messier, more emotionally volatile, and full of fragments and false starts that predict the contemporary condition almost eerily well.

A New Leaf directed by Elaine May

I’m sure I’m late to the party here but this movie is SO FUNNY and SO SWEET and treads the ever-so-fine line between earnestness and cynicism in the most perfect way. Walter Matthau plays an almost-unredeemable-if-it-weren’t-for-his-charm bachelor opposite Elaine May’s clumsy, bumbling heiress, as he tries to trap her in a marriage scheme to save his fortune. Everything goes wrong, of course, but all ends happily, like any good romantic comedy should.

Love Apple and Lou Ragland, Love Apple (2012)

Originally recorded in the late ‘70s and never intended for release, this lo-fi soul record was reissued by Numero Group in 2012 and is the perfect album for getting cozy on a cold winter night. My favorite track is “Call Me When You Want Me”—there’s a moment near the end where one of the singers sings sort of out of tune and it kills me every time.

Rasheeda (Editor)

Joanna Newsom, Ys (2006)

She might be considered the queen of millennial twee, but twenty years later harpist and singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom’s sophomore album Ys still endures as one of the best albums of this century. Precise yet wide-ranging, sentimental yet clear-eyed, Ys is searching, finding its way through the musicality of grief and memory. A perfect album for these blustery and frigid winter days.

Ruth (Head of Publicity, Publisher of Triangle Square Books for Young Readers)

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

Over the holiday I read Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me, which I highly recommend not just for the beautiful writing and the eye-poppingly fraught relationship she describes having with her brilliant but often cruel mother, but also for her insistence on creating a life at the nexus where literature and politics meet.

Sofia (Assistant Editor)

Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette you crazy girl! So different from her other works but the constant is Winterson’s wondrous and exuberant prose. I will always be a fan of her wild and colorful, random yet painfully poignant storytelling. This book is not just a mess of history and Gulliver-esque voyages, it is a reflection on time, on love, and the intersection of the two. Read this if you need some whimsy in your life!

Alphabetical Diaries by Shelia Heti

This was the first book I finished in 2026, and although it was a bit of a slow read, I cannot help but obsess over what a fun and insane exercise this project is and what my own version of it would look like. Fragmented, vulnerable, and humorous—this was the perfect start to my new year and I recommend it to anyone who wants to feel a bit more seen, a smidge more human.

La Chimera directed by Alice Rohrwacher

I finally watched this film with my brothers over the holiday break. Just like the quiet of the movie itself, I was left speechless by the end, trying to bask in the beauty and magic of Rohrwacher’s storytelling. A breathtaking ode to love and its persistence, a well-executed lesson in modernizing the genre of magical realism, a stunning soundtrack and score. You will never look at a red string the same after watching this. . . and you will be better off for it!

“Long Island City Here I Come” by Geese

Okay, you got me, I like Geese. Lock me up! I have recently been loving this song off their newest album “Getting Killed”—I just really like the complexity of Winter’s lyricism against the constant, harsh thrumming of the background score. This song builds, and it makes me want to run in the freezing cold and stretch out my arms and fall backwards into the somewhat hardened snow, and writhe around like a breakdancing snow angel.

On our website, we’ve compiled a timely selection of writings on the prison industrial complex, the militarization of police, and what we can do to stop it, featuring books by Angela Y. Davis, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Huey P. Newton, Victor Serge, Che Guevara, Sonali Kolhatkar, Ulrike Meinhof, Upton Sinclair, Subcommandante Marcos, and many others.

CLICK HERE TO EXPLORE THE LIST

“Conventional wisdom would have one believe that it is insane to resist this, the mightiest of empires, but what history really shows is that today’s empire is tomorrow’s ashes; that nothing lasts forever, and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human spirit.” ―Mumia Abu-Jamal

Melt ICE. Defund the Police. Abolish Prisons. Refuse State Repression.

CLICK HERE TO EXPLORE THE LIST

FURTHER READING:

Against Police Violence: Writers of Conscience Speak Out (FREE eBOOK)

“The Problem of Illegality” by Victor Serge

“Talking about Abolition” by Sonali Kolhatkar

“Now Is the Time for True Courage” by Bree Newsome

An Interview with Angela Davis

José Martí, born January 28, 1853, organized and unified the movement for Cuban independence from Spain, ultimately giving up his life for the cause. His dedication to the goal of Cuban freedom made his name a synonym for liberty throughout Latin America.

Our newly released José Martí reader brings together his bilingual poetry, political essays, cultural writing, and letters, into one definitive volume. Readers will discover a literary genius and an insightful political commentator on the troubled relationship between the United States and Latin America.

As Cuban revolutionary leader Carlos Rafael Rodríguez once wrote, “Martí was the guide of his time but also stands as the anticipator of ours.”

Below, you’ll find the late scholar Ivan A. Schulman’s introduction to the book, in which he explores José Martí in all of his various iterations: Martí as poet, Martí as essayist, Martí as Cuban nationalist, Martí as parent, Martí as revolutionary symbol, and, ultimately, Martí as martyr of the anti-imperialist struggle.

Ivan Schulman on José Martí

José Martí (1853–95) was a revolutionary writer in every sense of the word. Born of Spanish parents in colonial Cuba, he witnessed the oppressive measures imposed on the island by the Spanish colonial administration. Early in his life he made the decision to fight for the liberation of his country and similarly oppressed Antillean peoples. But Martí was not merely a political revolutionary: he was a revolutionary in literature who gave expression to the emerging ideas and emotions of a modernizing world in a language and style that perplexed and fascinated many of his contemporaries. Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (1859– 95), for example, wrote of the Cuban that at times he could not follow his ideas, “because his ideas have sturdy wings, strong lungs, and rise inordinately… [in his] magical style we lose ourselves from time to time, like Reynaldo in the garden of Armida…”

Martí’s conscious resolve to devote himself to revolutionary political and literary ideals became clear shortly after the first Cuban war against Spain (1868). During this period he participated in the publication of clandestine newspapers and circulars, including El Diablo Cojuelo (The Crippled Devil), and later, La Patria Libre (Free Homeland). In the latter, in 1869, he published a dramatic poem, “Abdala,” in which the main character sacrifices his life to defend his country against its oppressors. For a while the colonial regime took no action against Martí; but in 1869, when he and a friend, Fermín Valdés Domínguez, signed a letter questioning the political behavior of one of their classmates, Martí was accused of treason against the Spanish colonial regime. He was tried and condemned to six years’ hard labor in the quarries of San Lázaro in Havana.

The San Lázaro experience is recorded in a political essay “Political Prison in Cuba,” published in 1871, that is both moving and revealing: moving, because it records an adolescent’s reaction to the harsh, sometimes nightmarish conditions of a forced labor camp; revealing, because it foreshadows the expressive force of a mature writer. “Political Prison in Cuba” is directed to the Spanish authorities; it is a plea for humanity and reform in the administration of the island. It is also a milestone in the evolution of the prose in a period of metamorphic change called Modernismoin Latin American literature and culture. “Political Prison in Cuba” was followed by a companion piece entitled “The Spanish Republic and the Cuban Revolution,” written in Spain in 1873, where the young Martí was exiled after his sentence was commuted.

Martí’s Spanish exile marks the initiation of a lengthy period of peregrination: Spain, Mexico, Venezuela, and, finally the United States, a productive period during which he wrote, spoke to Cuban and Hispanic revolutionary and cultural societies, and organized the invasion of colonial Cuba in 1895.

Spain is where Martí received his formal education: at the universities of Zaragoza and Madrid he earned degrees in philosophy and law. Late in 1874 he left Spain for Mexico, with a brief stay in France. After Europe, Martí found Mexico to be a hospitable environment. He participated widely in the country’s cultural life, wrote for the Revista Universal, helped found the Sociedad Alarcón, debated the merits of spiritualism and materialism in a national forum, wrote a play entitled Amor con amor se paga (Love is Repaid with Love), which premiered in 1875. It was in Mexico where Martí met Carmen Zayas Bazán, who was to become his wife and, subsequently, the symbol of a painful, frustrated domestic life. The rise of the dictator Porfirio Díaz signaled the end of Martí’s Mexican residence and the renewal of his wanderings in search of a place where he could work with personal freedom. He returned briefly to Cuba, responding to the pull of family and a desire to resettle in his homeland.

Guatemala was Martí’s next resting place. His stay there also proved to be brief. He was appointed to the faculty of the Escuela Central de Guatemala where he taught French, English, German and Italian literature as well as the History of Philosophy. For a while life seemed prosperous and serene; he married Carmen Zayas Bazán, contributed to Guatemala’s developing cultural life, and wrote of his gratitude to that country in a slender volume entitled “Guatemala” (1878). A shift in political factions made life there untenable for him. Once again Havana drew him; but while working in the Havana law offices of Miguel Viondi, his revolutionary activities resulted in his second deportation to Spain in 1879.

Instead of staying there, he left almost immediately for France, and then to the United States. While in New York, he met Charles A. Dana who invited him to write for the New York Sun; but New York was not to become Martí’s home until after he attempted life in Venezuela. In 1881 he went to Caracas with the hope of finding refuge and solace in “Our America,” as he called the Hispanic countries of the New World. Things went well in Venezuela, but again, for an extremely short period. Nevertheless, in that time he succeeded in founding an important Modernist magazine, the Revista Venezolana. In its second issue of July 15, 1881, he defended his magazine’s style, and in the course of this defense, developed one of Modernism’s early manifestos:

Some of the “simple” pieces that appeared in our last issue have been tagged and polished exquisite. What follows is not a defense, but a clarification. Private speech is one thing; passionate, public discourse, another. Bitter polemics speak one language; quite another, serene biography… Thus, the same man will speak in a different language when he turns his searching eyes to past epochs, and, when with the anguish and ire of a soldier in battle, he wields a new arm in the angry struggle of the present age… The sky of Egypt ought not be painted with London fogs, nor the youthful verdure of our valleys with the pale green of Arcadia, or the mournful green of Erin. A sentence has its adornments, like a dress, and some dress in wool, some in silk, and some become angry because their dress is wool and are displeased to see another’s is silk. Since when has it become a defect to write in polished form?… It is essential that notice be taken of the following truth about style: writers should paint just as the painter does. There is no reason for one to use different colors from the other.

When Martí left Venezuela for New York, he renewed his writing for the Sun. New York was to be Martí’s permanent home until he returned to Cuba, just prior to his untimely death fighting for Cuba’s liberation on May 19, 1895. In New York, which both attracted and repelled Martí, he wrote his best prose and poetry. Amidst the din and clatter of an industrializing society, plagued by labor strikes, anarchist terrorist attacks, and racial and religious conflicts, Martí peered into the fortune of a capitalist society, and from this vantage point drew conclusions he described in his prose pieces about life in the United States written for Latin America’s major newspaper, La Nación(Buenos Aires). His association during 1883 with this newspaper was followed by invitations from others, among them La República (Honduras), La Opinión Pública (Uruguay), and El Partido Liberal (Mexico).

To earn enough for survival, this extraordinary writer became a versatile professional: a translator for Appleton, a clerk for Lyon and Company, a consul for Uruguay (1887) and Argentina (1890). Writing and political organization took up the rest of his energy and time. Martí immersed himself in the careful planning of the Cuban revolutionary process. He organized patriotic clubs not merely in the New York area, but all along the Eastern seaboard, especially in Florida among the tobacco workers of Tampa and Key West. Addressing these working class groups he displayed a passion and fervor that transfixed his audiences. Unfortunately, many of these speeches have been lost. A few that have survived, such as “Los pinos nuevos” (“The New Pines”) show the hand of a writer of learning, passion, and rhythmic prose, and of an accomplished political tactician who skillfully swayed his audience.

With the generals of the revolutionary forces, Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, Martí organized and monitored the émigré groups. In 1884 he had a falling out with the generals, especially Gómez; but later he worked with them again to raise the funds and provide the organization and arms for the 1895 invasion of Cuba. Martí’s was a Herculean task, superior to his dwindling physical strength, vitiated years before by lesions and diseases contracted in the quarries of San Lázaro. Yet such was his determination to see the liberation of his homeland that will and desire sustained a calendar of activities which would have sent more robust souls to an early grave.

Patriotism and martyrdom in the cause of Cuba and Puerto Rico consumed his being. Writing and his faith in the revolution kept him alive. To be sure, there were frequent moments of despair. His experiences with human cruelty were such that at one point he wrote: “It is with horror that one looks within many intelligent and attractive men. One leaves in fright, as from a lion’s den.” This modern Machiavellian analyst wrote: “Men like to be guided by those who abound in their own shortcomings.” Cognizant of human foibles, but committed to social redemption, he noted: “Man is ugly, but humanity is beautiful.” Martí’s was an 18th century faith in the perfectability of humankind, in social progress and in the feasibility of socioeconomic reform. Like the thinkers of the Enlightenment, he needed to be persuaded of the inevitability of violent change, which he espoused only when all other viable channels were exhausted.

Martí found temporary release from anguish in poetic creation. Poetry had a double interface for him: “To create beautiful poetry one has only to turn one’s eyes outward: to Nature; and inward: to the soul.” Nature was an enchantress, who consoled, fortified and soothed. By contrast, internal suffering purified inspirations and provided release from the oppressive realities of everyday existence. Pain, said Martí, “matures poetry… Man needs to suffer. When he lacks real pain, he creates it. Pain purifies and prepares.” Convinced that suffering engenders art, the poet poured his personal anguish into his verses.

Martí wrote three major books of poetry: Ismaelillo(1882), Versos sencillos (Simple Verses, 1891), and Versoslibres(FreeVerse, 1913). A fourth volume, entitled Flores del destierro(Flowers of Exile, 1933), somewhat loosely organized by Gonzalo de Quesada y Miranda, and some other poems have been traditionally included in other volumes. Ismaelilloand Simple Verses were published in New York during the poet’s lifetime; he read the proof for both works. Free Verse was first published posthumously, transcribed inaccurately from complex manuscripts and corrected by the present writer.

All of the volumes have one element in common: one which Karl Vossler described as the characteristic of all poets of intense fantasy: a capacity for liberating themselves from the norms of the linguistic community; by passing under or over words, such poets create works by means of notes, melodies, rhythms, images, gestures and dances. This is the case with Martí and that of other Modernist poets of his generation: they were subjective creators, attentive to internal flux. In this connection, Fina García Marruz finds syllabic groupings of suffering in FreeVerse, and Cintio Vitier senses the voice of a poet of light and movements, who creates a baroque, obscure, foaming, volcanic, abrupt and strange world. Martí’s is a highly original verse, in which there is both innovation and tradition, a paradoxical admixture common to the poets of the Age of Modernity, intent upon recasting the past to express an unstable present.

Of Martí’s three principal poetic works, Ismaelillois a free, luminous volume, written largely in Caracas, and published in New York. Its imagery is so singular that the poet felt compelled to comment on its oneiric quality in a letter to Diego Jugo Ramírez on May 23, 1882:

I’ve seen those wings, those jackals, those empty goblets, those armies. My mind was the stage, and on it all those visions were actors. My work, Jugo, consisted of copying. There isn’t one single mental line there. And, how should I be responsible for the images which come to me without calling them? I have done nothing more than put my visions into verse.

The volume is dedicated to the poet’s absent son. The poet occupies the center of a visionary space in which the perils of modern life assault the poet/narrator. “Alarmed by everything, I take refuge in you,” he writes to his son in the brief introduction. The absent son is ever-present in verses whose levels of reality and dreams reach beyond the limits of 19th century positivism and reason. “I dream with open eyes,” reads the first line of “Sueño despierto” (“I Dream Awake”). The visionary quality is sometimes surrealistic: “And on the backs/ Of giant birds/ Endless kisses/ Awaken.” Though a process of inversion, a metamorphosis is effected by filial love; the father conjures up the vision of the son, and in this vision is reborn through the son: “I am the son of my son!/He remakes me!” This identification of father and son orchestrates and unifies the metaphoric eruptions of a volume, which, at bottom, is a musical concert centering around three motifs, filled with chaotic, tender and troubled leaps to a loosely associated poetic space. Ismaelillo’s motifs are the poet, the son, the world; the leaps are executed in the form of voyages in which traditional time and space concepts are unhinged so that the poet-son can move freely outside the limitations of a traditional Logos. In “Musa traviesa” (“Mischievous Muse”) he writes: “Often, a rider/ In momentous dreams,/ I ride long hours,/ Through the air./ I pierce rosy clouds/ I fathom deep seas,/ And in the eternal bowels/ I travel.”

In these travels the poet/son/seer comes upon battles, visions of martyrdom, caves, dances, erotic scenes, heights of idealism and depths of materialism; it is a confusing world the narrator captures: reflecting the frightening realities of modern life. We witness torments, confused scenes, temptations, moments of disarray, and spirited battle. It is a spectacle of “splendid transformations” that boils, creaks, bites and assaults the agonists of modern life. In keeping with these decentered, fragmented visions, the son is Ismael, Jacob, the object of pleasure, love, tenderness, the heart, the soul of the father and, finally, not merely his reflection but his very being. Thus, this volume, more than the lyric prayer book Rubén Darío found it to be, more than the “Art of Being a Father” which he saw in it, is rather a voyage that incarnates a modern mythic sense of experience and existence.

Equally personal, and equally anguished are the poems of Free Verse. Darío said of them that they were free verse, produced by a free man. Martí called them “my irritated Free Verses,” “my rough hendecasyllables, borne of great fears, or of great hopes, or of an unbridled love of liberty, or of a painful love of liberty…” In his preface, Martí insisted, once again, as in his Ismaelillo, upon the visionary quality of his verses, visions that he “copied” and for whose strangeness, singularity and passion he alone was accountable. These are verses written, “not in academic ink, but rather in my own blood,” an image used by the poet to refer to their personal quality as well as the aura of sacrifice and martyrdom that pervades so many of the poems. Their key words are love, liberty, unconquered, passionate, natural, vigorous. To this linguistic base, José Olivio Jiménez adds another that centers around the terms circumstance, nature, transcendence, and three concepts: love, suffering, duty. The originality of these poems consists in their anguish. It is a poetry of existence in which the poet/narrator confronts the imperative to transmit an authentic, sincere, necessary reality. “What matters in poetry,” he wrote, “is to feel, regardless of whether it resembles what others have felt; and what is felt anew, is new.”

Images of nature, often traditional in origin, appear in this volume as in others by the Cuban, but it is man, not nature, that occupies the center of his poetic discourse. It is a poetry that speaks of daily cares, experiences, existences; it radiates in circular patterns, reaching toward the upper spheres, that is, toward a quality of transcendence noted by Jiménez, and which in spatial form points to the fundamentally realistic; it is based upon specific, concrete circumstances: those of his life, and of the emotions of his existence. Unamuno called Martí’s words “acts”; but when the Cuban poet harnessed his words to his thoughts he created novel structures which even today surprise us by dint of their modernity.

The visionary quality of his first volume persists in FreeVerse; present also are the dualities of experience, the antithetical images that constitute Martí’s assumption of the contradictions of modern life and the aspirations of perfection and idealistic placement of his visionary poetics. The dualities sometimes represent a world truncated, or the poet’s simple vision of life: “I have lived: I have died.” The poet in his anguish wishes to sacrifice himself to his fellow man, for that is his mission in life. At times, he feels useless, unable to realize the martyrdom that will release him from his terrestrial struggle and allow him, finally, to seek an undefined solace in a vaguely expressed afterlife.

Less anguished, at least at first glance, are the poems of Simple Verses. Their apparent serenity is linked to their traditional, popular metrics, and to the poet’s insistence upon more direct and unencumbered forms of expression in comparison with the “volcanic eruptions” of the previous volumes. In this volume there is an emphasis upon the harmony of life and philosophy, or at least upon a system of transformation from crass, material forms to noble, ideal objects. And this search for and belief in idealism and harmony lends the volume a placid quality which has disquieting moments, for the Simple Versesare poems born of pain and anguish: “My friends know how these verses were born in my heart. It was in that winter of anguish, in which out of ignorance, or due to fanatical faith, or fear, or courtesy, the Spanish American republics met in Washington, in the shadow of the dreaded eagle,” wrote Martí in the introduction. Martí represented Uruguay at the International Monetary Conference in Washington, D.C., called by the United States to standardize currency in Latin America. Martí led the opposition of the Latin American countries to the plans of the United States to impose a silver standard.

Elsewhere, the poet explained that “To suffer is a duty. With what does one write well in prose or verse, but with blood?” The poet’s anguish is personalized. The verses speak of his individual view of the world, as the poet/seer turns his eyes upon the universe internalized, and describes its external and internal structures. The poet has assumed the universe, and from a symbiotic stance he offers new insights into its meaning. Martí’s experience is broad: it includes the divine spirit, the terrestrial clamor of voices, envy, hate, human ugliness, materialism, idealism, the metamorphosis of reality. The nature of writing poetry is also present here as in previous volumes. But, unlike these, experience is expressed from the viewpoint of a compendium, seen, to be sure, from the interior world (“I know,” “I’ve seen,” “I hear,” “I am,”) of the creator in search of harmony:

All is beautiful and constant,

All is melody and reason,

And all, like a diamond,

Is dark before light.

In Simple Verses one finds the most frequently cited Martí verses: IX is devoted to “La niña de Guatemala” (“The Girl From Guatemala”), and X to “La bailarina española” (“The Spanish Dancer”). Other sections may be less musical and more anguished, but all point to the future in modern poetry. In VIII and XI the poet carries on a dialogue with his doubles: a page/skeleton; a dead friend. In the end, in XLVI a conversation is established between the poet and his verse in which he declares, “Verse, as one our fates are sealed:/We are damned or saved together!”

Both Martí and his poetry have survived; but not merely Martí the poet. Martí is one of Spanish America’s most original prose writers. “Verses,” he said, “can be improvised, but not prose; prose style comes with maturity.” His early prose works, mentioned above, were followed by a voluminous opus of imaginative, rhythmic, chromatic pieces that found their way into the cultural and literary life of his period through a network of contemporary artists and the columns of the most prestigious newspapers of both North and South America. It is perhaps as a cronista, a chronicler of contemporary events — political, social and literary — that Martí is best known. He read accounts of current events voraciously. Such was his imagination that he was capable of creating visions of them as they occurred, even when he was not a witness to them.

His 1889 account of the opening of the Oklahoma frontier, for example, appears to have been written by a journalist astride a horse, who observed the excitement and violence of the events. His moving account of the 1886 earthquake in Charleston, South Carolina, contained the shrill cries and the emotional despair, the fervent, frightened prayers of the residents, as if the chronicler himself had experienced the tragedy. Martí wrote with vision, compassion, uncanny perception and a highly developed concept of innovative style on subjects as diverse as European monarchs, American anarchists, New York elevated railways, urban tenements, violent crimes, St. Valentine’s Day, Buffalo Bill, the Cody Brothers, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American technology, and agricultural and floral exhibitions. On all of these, and others too numerous to mention, Martí informed his Latin American readers. He was especially careful to show them the advantages as well as the dangers of life in a modernizing, capitalist society such as the United States, hoping to interest his fellow men in technical innovations while avoiding the social, racial, and political strife he observed in New York. For his American readers of the NewYorkSunhe wrote mainly of life in Europe, signing with a pseudonym, M. de S.

Another of Martí’s major undertakings while in New York was La Edad de Oro: Publicación mensual de recreo e instrucción dedicada a los niños de América (The Golden Age: A Monthly Magazine of Instruction Dedicated to the Children of Spanish America). He contributed his own writing to the magazine as well as selecting artists for translations. La Edad de Oro became a milestone in Spanish children’s literature.

Freedom from Spanish rule for his native Cuba, the liberation of Puerto Rico, and economic and political independence for the Antilles and Latin America were constantly on Martí’s mind. In essays, speeches and poems, this liberating discourse — a hallmark of Modernism — is a recurring mark. Though he suffered physically and emotionally at the hands of the Spanish colonial authorities in Cuba, Martí never expressed a sense of animosity toward Spain. Instead, he espoused a doctrine of love and brotherhood; he hoped that the war with Spain, if unavoidable, would be brief and swift. In his writings on Cuba he argued for political unity, economic modernization (without the pitfalls of US capitalism), respect for human rights, and a broad, democratic, participatory social compact. When it was clear there was no other road but revolution to achieve Cuba’s freedom from colonial rule, he organized a political party among exiled Cubans residing in the United States — the Cuban Revolutionary Party — and almost single-handedly planned the 1895 invasion of Cuba. As a political strategist his sights were set on achieving independence for his native island, hence, like so many other Latin American essayists, his political writings are fundamentally instrumental or programmatic. His grasp of contemporary and future social and economic institutions was stunning, so much so that critics such as Cintio Vitier perceive in his essays on Cuba a futurity that guided not merely Martí’s generation, but generations of writers and thinkers since. Martí wrote no single, organic political treatise on Cuba. However, he left a rich legacy of conceptualizations — perceptive and “necessary” — in separate, substantive essays such as “Con todos y para el bien de todos” (“With All and For the Good of All”), “El Partido Revolucionario Cubano” (“The Cuban Political Party”), or “El manifiesto de Montecristi” (“The Montecristi Manifesto”).

Less known, and less studied, are Martí’s letters. His epistolary art fascinated Unamuno and continues to attract devoted readers. Next to his poetry, the medium in which Martí expressed his most intimate thoughts are his letters, especially those to his closest friends and confidants. The letters to his friend Manuel A. Mercado, to María Mantilla, to his mother, are filled with the tenderness and anguish of Free Verse. In his letters Martí dared to bare his soul and allowed the solitude and suffering of a mission-driven artist and revolutionary to surface. The prose of these epistolary pieces is baroque at times, at others, limpid; sometimes convoluted, sometimes succinct; at others telegraphic. He once complained: “Words I cannot.” The reader at such moments is placed in the role of having to add, interpret, complete.

One other prose genre merits special comment: the novel — Martí wrote a single narrative without great enthusiasm as a favor to a friend. She had accepted to write the work for a New York magazine but could not. Under the pseudonym of Adelaida Ral, the Cuban agreed to compose a novel in her place in seven days; its format followed the prescriptions laid down by the editor: lots of love, a death, many young girls, no sinful passions, and nothing that might offend fathers of families or priests. And, it had to have a Spanish American setting. The narrative was not Martí’s favorite genre because, as he put it, one had to feign the existence of people, scenes and dialogues.

In this narrative, in his other prose pieces, his poetry, letters, and in his journals, Martí understood that man stood at the crossroads of an entirely new world order, the Age of Modernity. He understood its metamorphic qualities, he often felt anguished about their influence over man, the socioeconomic progress of Latin America, and the liberation of Cuba and Puerto Rico, always uppermost in his mind. He saw and understood the falling away of traditional institutions — religious, social and economic — and the accompanying cultural and ideological void. This visionary writer was thus able to write as early as 1882: “There are no permanent works, because those which are the product of reframing and recasting are by their very essence mutable and restless; there are no constant roads; the new altars, great and open as the woods, are barely visible.” Though they were invisible to most people, Martí was able to see and foresee, to write and speak the signs of both his age and the future, scanning the past and linking its universal values to an unstable chaotic present.

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Today is the 82nd birthday of Dr. Angela Y. Davis.

To celebrate her life and work, we’re proud to share an excerpt from our 2005 pamphlet Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture, an extended set of interviews with Dr. Davis, conducted by the late philosophy professor and noted scholar Dr. Eduardo Mendieta.

Angela Davis, you are probably one of the top five most important Black women in American history. In 1974, your book Angela Davis: An Autobiography was published by Random House. Since then it has become a classic of African-American letters that is central to the traditions of Black women writers and Black political thinkers. In many ways your autobiography also harkens back to the tradition of Black slave narratives. How do you see this work now with thirty years hindsight?

Well, thanks for reminding me that this is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of my autobiography. At the time I wrote the book I did not see myself as a conventional autobiographical subject and thus did not locate my writing within any of the traditions you evoke. As a matter of fact, I was initially reluctant to write an autobiography. First of all, I was too young. Second, I did not think that my own individual accomplishments merited autobiographical treatment. Third, I was certainly aware that the celebrity—or notoriety—I had achieved had very little to do with me as an individual. It was based on the mobilization of the State and its efforts to capture me, including the fact that I was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. But also, and perhaps most importantly, I knew that my potential as an autobiographical subject was created by the massive global movement that successfully achieved my freedom. So the question was how to write an autobiography that would be attentive to this community of collective struggle. I decided then that I did not want to write a conventional autobiography in which the heroic subject offers lessons to readers. I decided that I would write a political autobiography exploring the way in which I had been shaped by movements and campaigns in communities of struggle. In this sense, you can certainly say that I wrote myself into the tradition of Black slave narratives.

In what way do you think that the Black political biography plays a role within this tradition of American letters?

Well of course the canon of American letters has been contested previously, and if one considers the autobiography of Malcolm X as an example, which, along with literature by such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, that has clearly made its way into the canon, one can ask whether the inclusion of oppositional writing has really made a difference. Has the canon itself has been substantively transformed? It seems to me that struggles to contest bodies of literature are similar to the struggles for social change and social transformation. What we manage to do each time we win a victory is not so much to secure change once and for all, but rather to create new terrains for struggle.

Since we are talking about canons, it seems to me that your work fits within another tradition—the philosophical canon. If we think of the work of Boethius, of Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Antonio Gramsci, Primo Levi . . . these are philosophical figures who have reflected upon their prison experiences. Do you see your work contributing to this philosophical tradition of prison writing, and if so, how?

Well, often times prison writing is described as that which is produced in prison or by prisoners, and certainly Gramsci’s prison notebooks provide the most interesting example. It is significant that Gramsci’s prison letters have not received the consideration they deserve. It would be interesting to read Gramsci’s letters alongside those of George Jackson. These are two examples of prison intellectuals who devoted some of their energies to the process of engaging critically with the implications of imprisonment—at a more concrete philosophical level. Personally, I found it rather difficult to think critically about the prison while I was a prisoner. So I suppose I follow in the tradition of some of the thinkers you mention. However, I did publish a piece while I was in jail that could be considered a more indirect examination of issues related to imprisonment. I wrote an article entitled “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,”10 which helped me formulate some of the questions that I would later take up in my efforts to theorize the relationship between the institution of the prison and that of slavery. I produced another piece—a paper I wrote for the conference for the Society for the Study of Dialectical Materialism, associated with the American Philosophical Association—entitled “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation.” Both pieces were published in The Angela Y. Davis Reader in 1998. If They Come in the Morning, the book on political prisoners I wrote and edited with Bettina Aptheker, is another example of my prison writing. Finally, I also wrote an extended study of fascism which was never published. But it was only after I was released that I felt I had sufficient critical distance to think more deeply about the institution of the prison, drawing from and extending the work of the prison intellectual George Jackson.

You were trained as a philosopher, yet you teach in a program called the History of Consciousness at the University of California. Do you think that philosophy can play a role in political culture in the United States? And, has philosophy influenced your work on aesthetics, jazz, and in particular, the way in which you analyze the situation of Black women?

Absolutely, and I think that I draw from my background in philosophy in that I try to ask questions about contemporary and historical realities that tend to be otherwise foreclosed. Philosophy provides a vantage point from which to ask questions that cannot be posed within social scientific discourse that presumes to furnish overarching frameworks for understanding of our social world. I have earned a great deal from Herbert Marcuse about the relationship between philosophy and ideology critique. I draw particular inspiration from his work Counterrevolution and Revolt that attempts to directly theorize political developments of the late 1960s. But at the same time the framework is philosophical. How do we imagine a better world and raise the questions that permit us to see beyond the given?

There are beautiful pages in your autobiography about your relationship with Herbert Marcuse, who was your teacher and mentor, and part of the Frankfurt School. You spent some years in Frankfurt in the late 1960s. You also studied with Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Max Horkheimer. Do you see yourself as a critical theorist in this Frankfurt School sense?

Well, I’ve certainly been inspired by critical theory, which privileges the role of philosophical reflection while simultaneously recognizing that philosophy cannot always by itself generate the answers to the questions it poses. When philosophical inquiry enters into conversation with other disciplines and methods, we are able to produce much more fruitful results. Marcuse crossed the disciplinary borders that separate philosophy, sociology, and literature. Adorno brought music and philosophy into the conversation. These were some of the first serious efforts to legitimate interdisciplinary inquiry.

You ran twice as the vice-presidential candidate of the Communist Party in the United States before leaving the party in the 1990s. After the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, what role, if any, can communism play today?

Although I am no longer a member of the Communist Party, I still consider myself a communist. If I did not believe in the possibility of eventually defeating capitalism and in a socialist future, I would have no inspiration to continue with my political work. As triumphant as capitalism is assumed to be in the aftermath of the collapse of the socialist community of nations, it also continually reveals its inability to grow and develop without expanding and deepening human exploitation. There must be an alternative to capitalism. Today, the tendency to assume that the only version of democracy available to us is capitalist democracy poses a challenge. We must be able to disentangle our notions of capitalism and democracy so to pursue truly egalitarian models of democracy. Communism—or socialism—can still help us to generate new versions of democracy.

Do you think that the anti-globalization movement—the anti-WTO movement—can take up the role that Karl Marx assigned to the proletariat? In other words, can we say, “anti-globalists of the world unite”?

Well, this transition is a little too easy. But this is not to dismiss the importance of creating global solidarities, cross-racial solidarities attentive to struggles against economic exploitation, racism, patriarchy, and homophobia. And there is a link, it seems to me, between the internationalism of Karl Marx’s era and the new globalisms we are seeking to build today. Of course, the global economy is far more complicated than Marx could ever imagine. But at the same time his analyses have important contemporary resonances. The entire trajectory of Capital is initiated by an examination of the commodity, that seemingly simple unit of the capitalist political economy. As it turns out, of course, the commodity is a mysterious thing. And perhaps even more mysterious today than during Marx’s times. The commodity has penetrated every aspect of people’s lives all over the world in ways that have no historical precedent. The commodity—and capitalism in general—has insinuated itself into structures of feeling, into the most intimate spaces of people’s lives. At the same time human beings are more connected than ever before and in ways we rarely acknowledge. I am thinking of a song performed by Sweet Honey and the Rock about the global assembly line, which links us in ways contingent on exploitative practices of production and consumption. In the Global North, we purchase the pain and exploitation of girls in the Global South, which we wear everyday on our bodies.

The sweatshops of the world.

The global sweatshops. And the challenge is, as Marx argued long ago, to uncover the social relations that are both embodied and concealed by these commodities.

There is a great tradition of African-American political thought that has been deeply influenced by Marxism and communism. But one way that we sometimes talk about Black political thought is in terms of two figures in tension. For example, there are the comparisons made by John Brown versus Frederick Douglass; Booker T. Washington versus W. E. B. Du Bois; Malcom X versus Martin Luther King. And in this we are able to discuss the tensions between Black nationalism and assimilation or integration. How do you see yourself in relationship to the tension between nationalism and integration?

Well, of course it is possible to think about Black history as it has been shaped by these debates in various eras. And we shouldn’t forget the debate between W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. But I actually am interested in that which is foreclosed by the conceptualization of the major issues of Black history in terms of these debates between Black men. And I say men because the women always tend to be excluded. Where, for example, do Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells stand in these debates? But I am interested precisely in what gets foreclosed by this tension between nationalism and integration. And perhaps not primarily because the actors are male, but because questions regarding gender and sexuality are foreclosed.

So you see your work as contesting this way of viewing the Black tradition of political thought . . .

Yes.

. . . that way of making sense of integration.

Exactly.

So you wanted to displace the focus and say there’s another way in which Black political thought can proceed.

Absolutely, and I think that the assumption today that Black political thought must either advocate nationalism or must disavow Black formations and Black culture is very misleading.

Yes, but one of the things that is attributed to globalization is the end of nationalisms. Do you think that there is a role for Black nationalism in the United States? Has it become entirely obsolete, an anachronism?

Well, in one sense it has become obsolete, but in another sense one can argue that the nationalisms that have helped to shape Black consciousness will endure. First of all, I should say that I don’t think that nationalism is a homogeneous concept. There are many versions of nationalism. I’ve always preferred to identify with the pan-Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois who argued that Black people in the West do have a special responsibility to Africa, Latina America, and Asia—not by virtue of a biological connection or a racial link, but by virtue of a political identification that is forged in struggle. We should be attentive to Africa not simply because this continent is populated by Black people, not only because we trace our origins to Africa, but primarily because Africa has been a major target of colonialism and imperialism. What I also like about Du Bois’s pan-Africanism is that it insists on Afro-Asian solidarities. This is an important feature that has been concealed in conventional narratives of pan-Africanism. Such an approach is not racially defined, but rather discovers its political identity in its struggles against racism.

In addition to the recent thirtieth anniversary of your autobiography, we are also celebrating fifty-plus years of Brown v. Board of Education. Do you think that the forces of Black integration, the forces of civil rights, have been betrayed and somehow rolled-back by the past two decades of Rehnquist serving as the Reagan-appointed chief justice?

The promise of those struggles has been betrayed. But I don’t think it is helpful to assume that an agenda that gets established at one point in history will forever claim success on the basis of its initial victories. It is misleading to assume that this success will be enduring, that it will survive all of the changes and mutations of the future. The civil rights movement managed to bring about enormous political shifts, which opened doors to people previously excluded from government, corporations, education, housing, etc. However, an exclusively civil rights approach—as even Dr. King recognized before he died—cannot by itself eliminate structural racism. What the civil rights movement did, it seems to me, was to create a new terrain for asking new questions and moving in new directions. The assumption that the placement of Black people like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice in the heart of government would mean progress for the entire community was clearly fallacious. In this, there were no guarantees, to borrow from Stuart Hall. The civil rights movement demanded access, and access has been granted to some. The challenge of the twenty-first century is not to demand equal opportunity to participate in the machinery of oppression. Rather, it is to identify and dismantle those structures in which racism continues to be embedded. This is the only way the promise of freedom can be extended to masses of people.

But don’t you worry about the conservative court? I mean if we think about the role of the Warren Court in advancing the racial justice agenda . . .

Oh, absolutely!

The justices in today’s Supreme Court are very outspoken about their conservatism. What does this mean for racial justice in the future?

Of course I’m worried about that. The only point I’m attempting to make is that past struggles cannot correct current injustices and that people who tend to sit back and bemoan the betrayal of the civil rights movement are not prepared to imagine what might be necessary at this moment to challenge the conservatism of the Supreme Court. It’s very difficult to recognize contemporary racisms, especially when they are not linked to racist laws and attitudes and when they differently affect individuals who claim membership in racialized communities. I’m suggesting that we need a new age—with a new agenda— that directly addresses the structural racism that determines who goes to prison and who does not, who attends university and who does not, who has health insurance and who does not. The old agenda facilitates assaults on affirmative action, as Ward Connerly pointed out in his campaign for Proposition 209 in California. From his vantage point, what is most important today is the protection of the civil rights of white men.

Right. But very smart strategies are being used, ones that displace attention from issues of racial justice by speaking in terms of multiculturalism. An example is last year’s court decision in Michigan—Grutter v. Bollinger—that says that affirmative action must be administered for the sake of preserving multiculturalism. What is the difference between multiculturalism and racial justice?

There’s a huge difference. Diversity is one of those words in the contemporary lexicon that presumes to be synonymous with antiracism. Multiculturalism is a category that can admit both progressive and deeply conservative interpretations. There’s corporate multiculturalism because corporations have discovered that it is more profitable to create a diverse work place.

Benetton multiculturalism.

Yes. They have discovered that Blacks and Latinos and Asians are willing to work as hard, or even harder, than their white counterparts. But this means that we should embrace a strong politically inflected multiculturalism, which emphasizes cross-racial community and continued struggles for equality and justice. That is to say cross-racial community not for the purpose of creating a beautiful “bouquet of flowers” or an enticing “bowl of salad”—which are some of the metaphorical representations of multiculturalism—but as a way of challenging structural inequalities and fighting for justice. This version of multiculturalism has radical potential.

And along with the question of multiculturalism and racial justice, there’s another question that tremendously worries me personally, existentially. That is, we keep talking about the “browning” of the United States; that by the year 2050 a quarter of the American population will be of Latino descent. Do you think that this browning of America will entail an eclipse of the quest for racial justice?

Why should it?

Conservatives claim that questions of racial justice are essentially Black questions . . . and that multiculturalism and racial integration of Latinos are separate from racial justice work, affirmative action or reparations.

Well, you see, that’s the problem, and it seems to me that contemporary ideologies encourage this assumption that racial competition and conflict are the only possible relationships across communities of people of color. It is as if these communities are always separate and never intersect. But, if one looks at the labor movement, for example, there are numerous historical examples of Black-Latino solidarity and alliances. Regardless of which community might be numerically larger, without such solidarities and alliances, there can be no hope for an anti-racist future. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that this is a new era. Conditions of postcoloniality here in the United States and throughout the world convey the message that the “West” has been forever changed. Europe is not what it used to be. It is no longer defined by its whiteness. The same thing, of course, is true in the U.S. among Black people who are used to being the “superior minority.” We must let go of this claim. There is this prevalent idea that because Black people established the historical anti-racist agenda for the United States of Amer- ica, they will always remain its most passionate advocates. But Black people as a collective cannot live on the laurels of its historical past. We have recently received harsh lessons about conservative possibilities in Black communities. “Black” can not simply be considered an uncontestable synonym of progressive politics. The work of progressive activists is to build opposition to conservatism—regardless of the racial background of its proponents. That Black and Latino communities cannot find common cause is one example of this conservatism. Our job today is to promote cross-racial communities of struggle that arise out of common—and hopefully radical—political aspirations.

Over the last fifty-odd years, ANGELA YVONNE DAVIS has been active in numerous organizations challenging prison-related repression. Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1944, Davis studied at Brandeis University, the Sorbonne, and with Herbert Marcuse at the Goethe Institute. Her advocacy on behalf of political prisoners, and her alleged connection to the Marin County courthouse incident, led to three capital charges, sixteen months in jail awaiting trial, and a highly publicized acquittal in 1972. In 1998, Davis was one of the twenty-five organizers of the historic Berkeley, California conference “Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex.” She is the author of many books, including Are Prisons Obsolete?, Abolition Democracy, and The Meaning of Freedom.

EDUARDO MENDIETA (1963-2025) was a Colombian and American philosopher and academic. Until his death in December 2025, he was Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University, and acting director of the Rock Ethics Institute. His publications included The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apel's Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (2002), Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory (2007), and The Philosophical Animal: On Zoopoetics and Interspecies Cosmopolitanism (2024).

Abolition Democracy
Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture
Dr. Angela Y. Davis

In early 2004, photographs came to light revealing extensive prisoner abuses, instances of torture, and other war crimes at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib detention center, committed by U.S. military and other government personnel. At the time, the Human Rights Watch confirmed that “the only exceptional aspect of the abuse at Abu Ghraib may have been that it was photographed.” It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America’s most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison.

In Abolition Democracy, Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as “enemy of the state,” and about having been put on the FBI’s “most wanted list.” She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners.

Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing Bush-era disclosures about the disavowed “chain of command,” and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

We are proud to share Bolden’s preface to the collection, in which she both introduces readers to the book’s many contributors and shares the unmistakeable impact of sex work on her own artistic output.

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PREFACE

by Lizzie Borden

In the late 1970s and early ’80s in downtown New York, my friends and I hung out in funky bar/strip clubs like the Baby Doll and the Pussycat Lounge to watch our friend Cookie Mueller go-go dance. Cookie, the inimitable John Waters actress and writer, supported herself and her son largely on Social Security checks, an occasional film part, and columns for downtown magazines. Go-go dancing was just one more piece of the jigsaw puzzle of her survival.

I was a filmmaker at the time. Downtown—meaning anything below Twenty-Third Street—was where those of us seeking to escape traditional, often middle-class backgrounds came to make art. We were the first gentrifiers of raw, industrial loft spaces that had once housed turn-of-the-century sweatshops. In this scene, sex was everywhere: We saw nude performances by dancers and theater performers in galleries and art spaces. We took the subway to Times Square to sneak into “tip-and-touch” places. We’d seen all of Fellini, and we revered Sam Fuller’s film The Naked Kiss. We scoffed at Vegas showgirls with their perfect android bodies. But despite the ubiquity of sex in the city’s artistic and commercial life at the time, I’d always been mystified by what went on in the strip clubs that seemed to populate every street, male bastions advertised by neon signs. Who were the strippers who worked in them? What were they expected to do? And what made them want to do it?

So, I was in awe of Cookie and the other downtown writers, painters, and musicians who performed at the clubs in their thrift-store costumes, platform shoes, layers of eyelashes, and tons of glitter, alongside plenty of working-class dancers from the outer boroughs. They were as far from Vegas showgirls or Fellini vixens as one could imagine. The ironic casualness with which they vamped to popular songs in their underwear, using a pole only to keep their balance, changed my concept of who strippers could be.

Their comfort eased my own leap into a world of paid sex.

I’d been working on a film for several years by then, editing eight hours a day and shooting whenever I had a few hundred dollars. At some point, I learned that a few of my closest artist friends worked for a madam in a small brothel. My best friend dared me to do it with her; she told me it could be a way to afford to keep my film going. This kind of working was like Cookie’s go-going—nothing like the media stereotypes of street-based hookers or high-class call girls. Whatever our job, and whoever the client, we were riffraff, wearing what we could glean from our closets in order to meet the madam’s requirements. (“Dress as if you’ve just had lunch with your in-laws and are on your way to meet your boyfriend.”) We were solving our own jigsaw puzzles so we could make our art.

My way of justifying working at the brothel was to tell myself it was part of what I considered my “real work” of writing and directing, so I always went to work armed with a tape recorder. After a few months, I had enough material for a script—and had received a grant for the film I’d been working on—and I quit the brothel. My friends eventually quit, too; we were privileged by our middle-class position to leave when we wished. Among us was a shared secret.

What we didn’t share was the bravado of the go-go girls, onstage for everyone to see. On the street, when we encountered one another after years of being out of contact, we’d exchange cautious looks coded with reminders of our decades-long agreement: we wouldn’t out one another about the brothel. Our camaraderie shrank under the suspicious pressure to deny the past, a pressure I now understand to be the result of our internalized societal whorephobia.

That term, whorephobia—which, back then, had yet to be coined—describes this shame perfectly.

~~~

My feature film Working Girls, about a day in the life of a group of women working in a brothel, was released in 1986. My cover story — except to the sex workers I befriended— was that my film was about “a friend.”

As part of the promotional campaign, I had the opportunity to meet even more incredibly dynamic women who worked in the sex industry when my producers and I assembled several panels featuring sex workers and activists for discussions after screenings. In San Francisco, I met Margo St. James, a founder of the group COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), who advocated for the decriminalization of prostitution; Carol Leigh, the poet/writer/ activist who coined the term sex worker; strippers from the pre-unionized female-centric strip club the Lusty Lady; and Susie Bright, cofounder and editor of the woman-produced sex magazine, On Our Backs. In Los Angeles, I spoke with ex-cop turned sex worker and activist Norma Jean Almodovar, author of the bestselling book Cop to Call Girl. In New York, I had the pleasure of interviewing writer and spokeswoman for PONY (Prostitutes of New York) Tracy Quan; porn actor and educator Veronica Vera; pioneering porn film director Candida Royalle; and porn provocateur and artist Annie Sprinkle, whose cutting-edge performances included inserting a speculum to allow audience members to view her cervix. Later, I visited professional dominatrix (“prodomme”) Terence Sellers’s leather-walled dungeon.

All these encounters opened my eyes to the variety of jobs included in the world of sex work and the differing interests, desires, and needs of those who performed them. For example, escort Tracy Quan would never want to perform on a stage, but some strippers I knew might cross the line into seeing a regular client privately. Activist and self-proclaimed “whore” Carol Leigh was out and loud, but prodomme Terence Sellers operated in ultra-coded secrecy. Even so, we were all united against the exclusionary politics of radical feminist antiporn activists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, both early SWERFs, or sex worker exclusionary radical feminists, who argued that sex work was inherently degrading and oppressive. We all supported the decriminalization of sex work.

While political organizing by sex workers was active and passionate before the advent of social media, much of it was localized. In San Francisco, unrelenting activism around the Lusty Lady resulted in its becoming the first strip club to be unionized. In New York City, organizing took place through zines, in the back pages of weeklies, and on Al Goldstein’s cable show, Midnight Blue. Tracy Quan has written about how it shook things up for her when she became involved with PONY, stuffing envelopes at Annie Sprinkle’s apartment.

After I moved to Los Angeles in 2001, I met Jill Morley, who had come to LA to pitch a TV series based on stories she had written about her experiences go-go dancing in New York and New Jersey during the late eighties and early nineties. She also had a few stories by sister go-go dancers Debi Kelly Van Cleave, Susan Walsh, Terese Pampellonne, and Elissa Wald; and one by Cookie. The experiences relayed in these few stories could not have been more different. Debi Kelly Van Cleave and Terese Pampellonne both met their husbands in go-go clubs. But while Debi, a young, self-educated single mother, liked her customers and gained confidence onstage, Terese, a professional modern dancer, held the men in the go-go bars in disdain, refusing to give lap dances. Jill, more upbeat, used dancing as material for plays but hid her coke habit. Elissa Wald’s memoir evokes a Times Square club and its denizens with affection; Susan Walsh, a part-time reporter for the Village Voice, despised dancing; her dark stories grapple with existential questions. Susan disappeared in 1996 and is presumed murdered, her vanishing still under investigation. Cookie Mueller, too, died prematurely, in 1989, of HIV/AIDS.

These stories revealed their authors’ erotic imaginations, fears, desires. Dancing colored much of what they did, thought, and felt inside and outside the club. I asked Jill if I could publish the stories, and they became the foundation for this anthology.

At first, I wanted the book to remain within the time frame of the 1980s and ’90s in New York and New Jersey. It was an exciting time, before New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani erased the character of Times Square by closing porn theaters and peep shows. Susan Walsh—and, as I discovered later, Kathy Acker—performed in live sex shows there. Downtown, artists like Joan Jonas, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta, and Karen Finley used their own naked bodies in controversial, sexual works. Annie Sprinkle ruptured the boundaries between art and porn when she performed on downtown stages. I discovered later that writer Chris Kraus (I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker) also stripped during this time, as did the late novelist and slam poet Maggie Estep and the iconic ex-stripper/burlesque performer Jo Weldon.

Yet, strangely, I couldn’t find enough stories about stripping in this milieu to fill an entire anthology, although there were many about burlesque. Several writers did both. But burlesque is entirely theatrical, while stripping is transactional, creating gray areas often difficult to negotiate. Stripping itself wasn’t a uniform experience—sometimes dancers worked behind a barrier, as in peep shows; sometimes contact with customers led to full-service sex work. I considered adding stories about other kinds of sex work, but these jobs likewise seemed too different from stripping. Being a domme or an escort—operating one-on-one rather than in a group—can be very isolating, as can the more recent work of camming and sugar dating—young people seeking arrangements with older patrons. By contrast, every story I read about stripping involved, at least in part, relationships with other dancers in the club. I thought of a remark from Tracy Quan about how political organizing changed her view of her work:

I met people who worked in peep shows, in different kinds of brothels and dance clubs, on the street, in the domme sector. There were phone sex workers at our meets. I also had the chance to meet guys who sell sex. I loved having contact with people outside my scene and I developed this feeling that we’re like a nation, with provinces and constituencies, but still a nation of sex workers.

~~~

Despite the challenge of finding them, I decided to stick to stripping stories only for this book.

When I met Jill Morley at the turn of the millennium, except for Lily Burana’s landmark 2001 memoir Strip City, a recounting of Burana’s affectionate farewell to stripping, published writing about stripping consisted mostly of memoirs primarily intended to be, as Jo Weldon has described them, “redemptive narratives.” But there soon appeared a new kind of writing about stripping, in the form of stripper blogs. Many blogs seemed to be journals and/ or advice columns, “dos and don’ts” for wannabe strippers; some discussed the best song sets to play for dancing, or the best stage lighting, or how to handle bad customers. The responses to these posts from fellow strippers revealed an immense desire for communication and community, and as the internet expanded, more such sites appeared. Distinct voices began to emerge, credited to intriguing names like #Sassylapdancer, Mounting&Counting, #survivetheclub, and DiaryOfAnAngryStripper. Tits and Sass, a website that published writings by workers from every branch of the sex industry, became a lively forum.

One of the most influential strippers who became prominent in this period was Jacq Frances, aka Jacq the Stripper, who was also a writer, stand-up comedian, and cartoonist. (She is now retired from stripping.) I met Jacq after she published her first book, The Beaver Show. She became a star with the publication of her second book, Striptastic!, a collection of cartoons about stripping, which she wrote and drew after interviewing hundreds of other strippers. From this work, she created her business brand and began to conduct workshops around the country, selling stripper “merch” that led to her apparel line, Strippers Forever. Now she is developing a TV series.

Lindsay Byron (aka Lux ATL), based in Atlanta, stopped dancing in 2016 and now likewise conducts empowerment workshops and retreats for women.

Overseas, Sassy Penny, now a lawyer, was one of the founding members of the East London Strippers Collective, which created fundraising events in which strippers modeled for life-drawing classes.

Antonia Crane, who authored the introduction to this book, has been stripping and writing about stripping for more than two decades. While her stories explore, among other things, aging and disappointment in relationships, she uses her powerful voice in print and social media to rally strippers in her organization, Strippers United (formerly Soldiers of Pole). Formed after the 2018 passage of FOSTA-SESTA—legislation ostensibly designed to stop sex trafficking but that, in fact, deprives sex workers of means of advertising on the internet through sites like Backpage and Craigslist, thereby forcing many onto the streets and subjecting them to arrest by the FBI—Strippers United protests against wage theft and other problems affecting sex workers and rallies for the decriminalization of the profession. Crane rages at marches and strikes, but her writing is laced with self-deprecating humor, wonder, and tenderness.

For the Incredible, Edible Akynos, founder of the Black Sex Workers Collective in New York City, the pull toward activism was fueled by the pervasive racism in strip clubs. While she ultimately quit stripping because of anti-Black hiring and firing practices, her lush writing lays bare the soul of a romantic with a sly sense of humor and great empathy for her clients.

AM Davies’s activism has been similarly unflagging, although she was recently forced to stop dancing due to an unthinkable accident, which she recounts here in her devastating piece.

Like Akynos, Selena the Stripper, a Black and Latine non-binary sex worker, stripper, podcaster, and writer who is now president of Strippers United, seeks to empower sex workers of all races and genders through political organizing.

Meanwhile, Kayla Tange performs an Asian identity in the clubs, but she reclaims her power by creating performance artworks that purposely confound the audience with their own stereotypes.

All their stories reveal the seeming contradictions that can coexist in this line of work. Although New York stripper, burlesque dancer, and activist Essence Revealed chronicles depression in her essay for this collection—a condition likewise caused by the degradations of anti-Blackness in the business—she’s equally honest about the perks of the job and the skills it has taught her, which she now uses to conduct online empowerment workshops.

While some strip clubs are notoriously dangerous, turning a blind eye to harassment and even rape, Reese Piper, who is on the autism spectrum, finds strip clubs safer for her than many other places because of their strict rules governing interaction between customers and dancers.

~~~

Social media connections now provide a support system for strippers that wasn’t feasible a mere fifteen years ago. Many strippers now know one another online, if not always in real life, and support one another through lonely nights in clubs with no customers, fights with mean girls, family problems, romantic problems, legal problems, and the economic, safety, and health issues they have all confronted throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. In this book, I’ve tried to convey some of this sense of community by having some of the dancers interview each other. Jill Morley interviews Jacq Frances, Lindsay Byron, and Jo Weldon. Antonia Crane chose to be interviewed by Dr. Vanessa Carlisle, a scholar and professional domme. Chris Kraus was interviewed by Alison J Carr, a British academic and performance artist; Carr also interviews Sassy Penny, with whom she has worked in London. This is more than a village: it is a bustling, global community.

At the same time that it has brought them together, the internet has also made sex workers of all kinds more visible to the general public—not just their professional personas but also their personal lives. Yet, whether sex workers are being lauded by observers who claim to support them while declining to fight for their rights or being condemned by those who vilify all sex work, the habitual othering of sex workers persists, allowing those who have never done the job to maintain an imagined boundary between themselves and these ostensibly enigmatic, problematic figures.

After Akynos addressed Antonia’s writing class at UCLA, Antonia asked about her goals for the Black Sex Workers Collective. Akynos invoked Jacq Frances:

Jacq has campaigns where she makes fun of the strait-laced job versus the stripper—that’s changing the conversation on how we look at work, at sex workers. And we want to do something like that, where we’re making comparisons to the Hollywood casting couch, to what sex workers might go through in a strip club, because I feel like the conversation of what sex work is and who we really are needs to shift. A lot of conversation about sex workers makes me uneasy because I feel like we’re talking about us as if we’re aliens. I just don’t want to hear a conversation like, “Let’s find out who sex workers are.” I want to ignore that and just talk about us like we’re regular, because we are regular. So instead of, “Let’s sit down with the sex workers and find out what their life is like,” it’s like, “I’m right in the grocery store line with you, boo; you just need to stop it.”

For some writers in this collection, stripping was an early aspiration. For Jo Weldon, it was a romantic ideal inspired by performers she admired in movies. For Susan McMullen, it was a joyful escape from the Canadian provinces with her best friend, Lindalee Tracey, of Not a Love Story. Jodi Sh. Doff ran away from a middle-class Long Island home with the intention of finding a pimp in Times Square; Akynos grew up near Playboy’s New York City office yearning to be a porn centerfold. But for many other contributors, including the go-go dancers whose stories originally inspired this book, stripping was and continues to be their only viable economic option for supporting other pursuits. One reason is the widespread stagnation of educational and job opportunities, especially for writers and artists, in the decades since Cookie Mueller danced. Like her, dancers today piece together their lives, stripping to augment teaching jobs and acting gigs and freelance work and grad school stipends while raising kids and caring for elders and trying to change the world. Postpandemic, their employment prospects have only worsened.

Whereas most of the contributors to this anthology who worked in the seventies or eighties danced for only a few years before moving on, these days, stripping is a lifestyle choice and a career for many. Some strippers now have over twenty or thirty years in the business. But although the empowerment narratives that have emerged in tandem with strippers’ increased visibility and their work’s longevity—embodied in performances by pop artists like Cardi B, music videos, twerking in thousands of self-posted videos on social media, films like Hustlers and Zola, TV series like P-Valley, and the popular embrace of pole dancing as a sport—may suggest acceptance, strippers today still face overwhelming stigma and whorephobia, in addition to other challenges. The stigma reaches back in time—two writers who danced briefly in the eighties and whose writing had been in this collection for years dropped out of this project because they were concerned about the negative impact it could have on their current careers. And labor conditions for dancers working today are worse than ever. Activists are trying to change media portrayals of their work and, along with these, the actual working conditions in clubs. When she is interviewed for TV, Antonia Crane demands that a sex worker be present on the production team, a request that frequently raises eyebrows. She and others have also called for hiring sex workers for meaningful paying jobs, as opposed to sometimes decorative “consultant” credits, on TV shows and films that portray sex worker characters. Crane is acutely aware of the darker realities behind the empowerment narratives. As she remarks in her interview with Dr. Vanessa Carlisle:

I find myself hungry for a less celebratory experience. Where’s the melancholy stripper who’s a woman of color, who’s queer, who gets turned away from her strip club because they have too many Black girls? Show me the story of the melancholic Black stripper. Show me the human, sad issues.

~~~

Much has been written about strippers and sex workers by civilians, including feminist academics who, despite never having walked in their platform stilettos, feel entitled to argue for or against social and political programs that could have devastating effects on the lives of the sex workers they’re writing about. Watching strippers from the sidelines, I, like many observers, have been dazzled by their extraordinary confidence, enamored of their brave nakedness and sense of play. I wish I could catch it and internalize it by proxy.

For want of such an ability, I have instead gathered together the essays that make up this anthology. These stories, by strippers themselves, are glimpses into their lives of camaraderie and celebration, joy, pride, despair, frustration, self-doubt, and fear—lives that are complicated, contradictory, and bold.

WHOREPHOBIA
Strippers on Art, Work, and Life

Edited by Lizzie Borden

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Illuminating accounts of how stripping and sex work informs writers’ experiences of friendship, motherhood, teaching, working, creating art, and activism.

No one knows more than strippers about being looked at: as objects of desire, objects of curiosity, as angels or Jezebels or hookers with hearts of gold. In this anthology, twenty-three dancers whose careers span decades, geographies, and identities demand to be seen. Through stories from first nights on the job to the day they hung up their sky-high heels—or decided they never will—these writers offer glimpses into lives of camaraderie and celebration, joy, pride, despair, frustration, self-doubt, and fear.

Their unfiltered perspectives on their lives, onstage and off, are a powerful counter-narrative to the whorephobia that shrouds the conventional portrayals of strippers in crime movies, TV shows, music videos, newspaper articles, and legislative debates. Each of these illuminating essays and interviews peels away tired myths and salacious speculation and presents the naked truth: that sex work is real work and strippers are real people.

LIZZIE BORDEN is a writer, director, editor, and script consultant. Her film Born in Flames was named one of “The 50 Most Important Independent Films” by Filmmaker magazine. Called “a feminist masterpiece” by New Yorker critic Richard Brody, in 2016, it was restored by the Anthology Film Archives and screened around the world. Borden also wrote, directed, and produced a controversial independent fiction film depicting the working lives of prostitutes, Working Girls, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Directors’ Fortnight, won Best Feature at the Sundance Film Festival, and was restored by the Criterion Collection in 2021. She is currently at work on several TV and film projects.

“To celebrate the launch of Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth, a new book by environmentalist and former Land Institute fellow Stan Cox, we’ve unlocked a portion of the introductory chapter. In the book, Cox makes the case for embracing degrowth, posing it not only as a means for preventing climate collapse but also for our collective emancipation from other systemic ills. He writes that “we can free ourselves from the growth economy and its many harmful impacts by seeing true wealth as the collective pursuit of meaning, social justice, and beauty while living within ecological limits.” As you read these passages, we invite you to imagine what a degrowth future might look like for you and your community.” —Irina Costache, assistant publicist

Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth

“An iconoclast of the best kind, Stan Cox has an all-too-rare commitment to following arguments wherever they lead, however politically dangerous that turns out to be.” —Naomi Klein

In spring 2020, a large share of the world’s people found themselves confined at home, either voluntarily or in response to lockdown orders. The goal, of course, was to slow transmission of the coronavirus causing Covid-19, but there were other consequences, and some of them turned out to be pleasant surprises.

After more than a century of exponential increase, global carbon emissions plunged 8.8 percent worldwide. Reductions were greatest in some of the highest-emitting regions: 13 percent in the United States and Europe, 12 percent in Brazil, and more than 15 percent in India. Walking and cycling increased dramatically. Air and noise pollution levels plummeted in large cities. Thanks to reductions in industrial activity and tourism, streams, rivers, and lakes became cleaner.

Even more striking was how animal life quickly filled spaces that humans had suddenly deserted. Enchanting photos flooded in from around the world. A herd of wild sheep and goats grazed alongside the expressway leading into Istanbul’s international airport. Mountain goats window-shopped on a main street in Wales; a deer strode through a striped crosswalk, Abbey Road–style, in Nara, Japan. Fallow deer grazed on lawns in East London. A herd of water buffalo took command of a major highway in New Delhi. A sea lion lounged on a Buenos Aires sidewalk, while a puma prowled through downtown Santiago, Chile. Raccoons romped in the surf at a public beach in Panama. Scientists who studied and documented this flourishing of nature in real time began referring to the phenomenon as an “anthropause.”

As animals roamed freely, the pandemic took a devastating toll on human life. Further hardship resulted from the very measures that were necessary to limit the number of people infected or killed. Alongside the misery, however, came some positive changes in people’s lives. A survey of more than three thousand adults under lockdown in Scotland found that many were enjoying more quality time and improved relationships with partners, family, and friends. Most had been exercising more than usual and paying better attention to their health. A whopping 83 percent had become “more appreciative of things usually taken for granted.”

In August 2020, with the second surge of the coronavirus underway, the Pew Research Center asked more than nine thousand US adults about their pandemic experience so far. As one would expect, a solid majority of the comments were negative, with 89 percent of those surveyed mentioning at least one unwelcome change in their lives. But 73 percent mentioned at least one unexpected positive change. Pew published verbatim quotes from some of the people they interviewed. The variety of responses is striking; furthermore, the lion’s share of people’s quotes, both negative and positive, referred not to the experience of the disease itself but to the measures they took to protect themselves from it.

To me, the positive side effects of efforts to suppress transmission of the coronavirus clearly suggest that if humanity adopts radical measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to near zero on an expedited schedule, many other problems might be ameliorated. To be sure, Covid-19 and climate change are very different kinds of problems. The former struck suddenly and hard, while the latter has unfolded slowly over decades, with dramatic impacts becoming clearly apparent only in recent years. Nevertheless, because affluent countries have procrastinated for three-plus decades and carbon has continued accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere, the need for forceful climate action is as immediate and urgent as was the need to suppress coronavirus transmission in spring 2020. The measures required to rein in greenhouse gas emissions are of much greater depth and breadth than those necessitated by the pandemic and will have an even broader range of consequences. But I anticipate that among those repercussions, we’ll find plenty of beautiful surprises.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UPSHOT

Over the past two centuries, industrial and postindustrial enterprises have been yanking societies back and forth between an improved and a degraded quality of life. Industry has developed preventatives and cures that increase lifespans but have also filled our world with toxic pollution, overmedication, and lethal weaponry, all of which shorten people’s lives. Industry has produced enough foodstuff per capita to keep everyone well fed—in theory—but billions suffer routine hunger while billions of others are oversupplied with unhealthful food. Corporations have made it possible—for privileged people at least—to move from place to place faster than any other organism on earth, but at a catastrophic cost to the environment and social justice. Big corporations have made intercontinental travel possible for hundreds of millions while providing the aircraft, ships, armored vehicles, missiles, and bombs that keep armed conflict raging somewhere on the globe every day of the year. They’ve developed systems that give us access to information from across the world in billionsfold greater quantities than before. Still, those systems have proven far more efficient in spreading disinformation, propaganda, and hate than in bringing us constructively together. All this economic production—the harmful, every bit as much as the useful—is aimed at keeping alive the impossible dream of exponential economic growth without end.

If we move boldly to prevent ecological collapse by deeply altering our values and curbing our material production and consumption, we will reap a host of other societal, ecological, and personal benefits that will enrich us with a more beautiful and meaningful life. In the process, I’ll show, we can free ourselves from a multitude of harms that plague us in today’s growth-at-any-cost society.

The public health policies of 2020 certainly had some beneficial side effects. Anthropologists, geographers, and other academics seemed especially inspired by an apparent resurgence of interest in humanity’s relationship with nature. A decades-long trend in which Americans had been spending more and more time indoors was reversed almost overnight. People took to gardening, hiking, bird-watching, cooking out, and playing backyard games. Whereas many national and state parks closed their gates, many urban parks and other communal green spaces stayed open, and they were in high demand.

In a 2020 study, 83 percent of US and UK survey subjects reported feeling an enhanced love of life and living things, an emotion that the surveyors, citing Edward O. Wilson, labeled biophilia, “the innate emotional affiliation that humans have with non-human life forms.” Even those respondents with the lowest interest in nature before the pandemic experienced a greater sense of biophilia during it.

Noting that the Global North’s retreat from “relentless consumerism and ‘always on’ economies” during the pandemic had immediate ecological benefits, a group of scholars wondered if the deadly pandemic might prompt the world’s privileged to pull back from the long-term damage we are doing to the earth and be better off for it. Urging that we take from the anthropause a lesson that a “fundamental scaling back of high-impact activities” can accomplish the kind of ecological healing that technology cannot, they argue that the “anthropause metaphor also implies that there are physical and spiritual benefits to slowing down, treading lightly, and limiting unnecessary human interventions in natural processes. We note that these associations are consistent with non-Western and Indigenous conceptualizations of human-nature relationships as requiring care, balance and reciprocity.”

Other academic observers hoped we would be prompted to “replace a sense of owning with a sense of belonging.”

HAPPY SUBTRACTIONS

The dramatic ecological transformation of society that’s needed to keep the earth livable for future generations would also yield some immediate environmental benefits. The 2020 anthropause illustrates some of those advantages: thriving biodiversity, reduced pollution, and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Otherwise, of course, life in the early Covid-19 pandemic was a lousy example for the future. For many, it was a time of increased deprivation, hunger, alienation, and labor exploitation.

The most affluent 1 percent of households captured most of the global economic wealth generated between 2020 and 2022 as Covid-19 raged; indeed, their share was nearly twice as large as the total that trickled down to the other 99 percent. The 1 percent also produced disproportionately large quantities of greenhouse gas emissions. But they’re only 1 percent. It’s the wealthiest 25 percent or so who account for the bulk of global emissions. That includes most but not all of us in rich countries. Economically stressed and racialized communities within the United States are not only responsible for less environmental damage than others; they are also most harshly impacted — not only by that damage but also by the political, economic, and technological forces that cause the damage.

Our economy is among those that cause the greatest damage to the earth’s living systems. If it continues to expand, it is doomed to fail eventually, causing widespread collapse of the ecosystem and society as we know it. Degrowth, therefore, is rational and imperative. A frequent tendency among those imagining material restraint in affluent societies is to dwell on the need for sacrifice and focus on the desirable elements of our lives that we would be required to give up. Sacrifice is indeed necessary, but it’s not the subject of this book. I instead direct attention to some of the pernicious features of twenty-first-century American life that people at various points up and down the economic pyramid can gleefully leave behind as we and future generations reduce the quantities of energy and material resources flowing through society.

Most people who are already being clobbered by the impacts of ecological breakdown, from the small island nations of the South Pacific, to East Africa, to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, to the charred forest lands of North America, already know very well that the affluent world needs to rein itself in, and quickly. Nor do racialized US communities, targeted over and over with the worst environmental consequences of capitalism, need to be convinced that the privileged must be constrained. But among many people who have known at least adequate material, environmental, and economic security, there may be a widespread worry that if that system is replaced with one that is just and sustainable, much of their security will be lost. It will indeed be a very different country and world, but if we all are to have a livable future, we must step into it. For encouragement, we can look around us at the system we’re leaving behind, recognize the calamities it’s causing, and imagine a better life without it.

Degrowth will relegate to the past all sorts of everyday problems that impact us collectively as well as personally, problems that can’t be banished solely by individual behavioral changes (although they can help). That banishment requires collective mobilization, both locally and globally. And it must account for the well-established fact that the multiplying impacts of climate chaos, land abuse, and pollution are distributed lopsidedly among households and communities, both locally and globally. In line with degrowth principles, this mobilization must ensure that the loss of economic dominance and the burden of reining in the overproduction that’s causing ecological breakdown must fall on people, communities, and businesses that have privileged status economically, racially, ethnically, and geographically. In contrast, both the avoidance of environmental calamity and the subtraction from everyday life of the myriad ills spun off by the current growth economy will be enjoyed by all.

Either for fear of losing their audience or because of their own misplaced faith in technology, environmental activists and opinion leaders tend to steer clear of talk about limits, restraint, sacrifice, and the need to reject material overabundance. Could a focus on happy subtractions help make messaging about the need for ecological limitations more appealing? What if the movement adopts persuasive new talking points about the outrages, annoyances, and grave dangers that plague us and our communities right now but won’t be following us into a future that keeps within ecologically necessary limits?

The pursuit of degrowth will honor the living world around us with a new anthropause, one that eliminates our destructive interactions with the ecosphere while fostering healthy ones. In doing so, we can free our own species from the burdens that capitalism and economic growth impose on us every day.

STAN COX is the author of seven books, including Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (2010), The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can (2020), and The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism,and the Next Pandemic (2021). His writing about the economic and political roots of the global ecological crisis have been published by the New York Times, Washington Post, the Nation, the New Republic, Al Jazeera, Yes!, the Progressive, and local publications across 43 U.S. states. In 2012, The Atlantic named Cox their “Readers’ Choice Brave Thinker” for his critique of air conditioning. He lives in Dearborn, Michigan.

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Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth by Stan Cox

In the spring of 2020, people worldwide found themselves confined at home in response to pandemic lockdown orders. Global carbon emissions suddenly plunged 8.8 percent. Air and noise pollution levels plummeted, and streams, rivers, and lakes noticeably became cleaner. Animal life quickly filled spaces that humans had deserted. Scientists documenting how quickly nature flourished in response to less human activity called the phenomena an “anthropause.” For a moment, humanity witnessed the beauty of degrowth.

In Anthropause, Stan Cox writes that by embracing degrowth, we are not turning our backs on progress. Instead, we are redefining it. We can produce enough goods to satisfy everyone’s needs, Cox argues, while liberating ourselves from ecocidal economies and the injustices they impose. This book lays out a clear vision of what we will gain and how as we embrace this revolutionary transition.

In a world obsessed with getting and having more—more influence, more money, more fame, more stuff—the idea of degrowth seems counterintuitive. Yet, as environmental catastrophe becomes more widespread and severe, degrowth emerges as a necessary collective intervention to protect the living Earth—and civilization as we know it—from collapse.

We are seeing climate change happening all around us—2024 was the hottest year on record. Storms are stronger, droughts are longer, and wildfires are everywhere. As we approach the tipping point toward irreversible climate catastrophe, it’s clear that we must accept that endless expansion is destructive and reverse it through degrowth. Anthropause shows us how we and the living world will flourish if we succeed.

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ON REVOLUTIONARY MEDICINE

Speech given at the inauguration of a training course at the Ministry of Public Health on August 19, 1960.

Compañeros:

Although this modest ceremony is only one among hundreds held as the of Cuban people celebrate day by day their freedom and the advance of all their revolutionary laws, their advance along the road to total independence, I nevertheless find it interesting.

Almost everyone knows that I started my career as a doctor some years ago. And when I started off as a doctor, when I began to study medicine, the majority of the concepts I hold today as a revolutionary were absent from the storehouse of my ideals.

I wanted to succeed, as everybody wants to succeed. I dreamed about being a famous researcher. I dreamed of working tirelessly to achieve something that could really be put at the disposal of humanity, but that, at the same time, would be a personal triumph. I was, as we all are, a child of my environment.

Through particular circumstances, and perhaps also because of my character, after receiving my degree I set out to travel through Latin America and I got to know it intimately. Except for Haiti and the Dominican Republic, I have visited — in one way of another — all the other countries of Latin America. And in the way I traveled, first as a student and afterward as a doctor, I began to come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child because of lack of resources, with the numbness that hunger and continued deprivation cause until a point is reached where a parent losing a child is an unimportant accident, as often happens among the embattled classes of our Latin American homeland. And I began to see that there was something that, at that time, seemed to me almost as important as being a famous researcher or making some substantial contribution to medical science, and that was helping those people.

But I continued being, as all of us always continue being, a child of my environment, and I wanted to help those people through my personal efforts. I had already traveled a lot — I was then in Guatemala, the Guatemala of Arbenz — and I had begun to make some notes to guide the conduct of a revolutionary doctor. I began to look into what I needed to be a revolutionary doctor.

However, the aggression came [in Guatemala], aggression unleashed by the United Fruit Company, the State Department, Foster Dulles — in reality, they’re all the same thing — and the puppet they put in named Castillo Armas — that was his name. The aggression was successful, given that the people had not yet reached the level of [political] maturity the Cuban people have today. And one fine day, I, like so many others, took the road to exile, or at least I took the road of fleeing from Guatemala, since it was not my homeland.

Then I realized one fundamental thing: to be a revolutionary doctor or to be a revolutionary, there must first be a revolution. The isolated effort, the individual effort, the purity of ideals, the desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals goes for naught if that effort is made alone, solitary, in some corner of Latin America, fighting against hostile governments and social conditions that do not permit progress. A revolution needs what we have in Cuba: an entire people mobilized, who have learned the use of arms and the practice of combative unity, who know what a weapon is worth and what the people’s unity is worth.

And then we get to the heart of the problem that today lies ahead of us. We already have the right and even the obligation to be, before anything else, a revolutionary doctor, that is, a person who puts the technical knowledge of his profession at the service of the revolution and of the people. Then we come back to the earlier questions: How does one do a job of social welfare effectively? How does one reconcile individual effort with the needs of society?

We again have to recall what each of our lives was like, what each of us did and thought, as a doctor or in any other public health function, prior to the revolution. We have to do so with profound critical enthusiasm. And we will then conclude that almost everything we thought and felt in that past epoch should be filed away, and that a new type of human being should be created. And if each one of us is their own architect of that new human type, then creating that new type of human being — who will be the representative of the new Cuba — will be much easier.

It is good for you — those present, the residents of Havana — to absorb this idea: that in Cuba a new type of human being is being created, which cannot be entirely appreciated in the capital, but which can be seen in every corner of the country. Those of you who went to the Sierra Maestra on July 26 must have seen two absolutely unheard-of things: an army with picks and shovels, an army that takes the greatest pride in marching in the patriotic celebrations in Oriente Province with its picks and shovels ready, while the militia compañeros are marching with their rifles. But you must have also seen something much more important: You must have seen some children who by their physical stature appear eight or nine years old, but who nevertheless are almost all thirteen or fourteen. They are the most authentic children of the Sierra Maestra, the most authentic children of hunger and poverty in all its forms. They are the creatures of malnutrition.

In this small Cuba, with four or five television channels, with hundreds of radio stations, with all the advances of modern science, when those children arrived at school at night for the first time and saw the electric lights, they exclaimed that the stars were very low that night. Those children, whom some of you would have seen, are now learning in the collective schools, from the ABCs right up to learning a trade, right up to the very difficult science of being revolutionaries.

These are the new types of human beings born in Cuba. They are being born in isolated places, in remote points in the Sierra Maestra and also in the cooperatives and centers of work.

All that has a lot to do with the topic of our talk today: the integration of the doctor and every other medical worker into the revolutionary movement. Because the revolution’s task — the task of training and nourishing the children, the task of educating the army, the task of distributing the lands of the old absentee landlords among those who sweated every day on that same land without reaping its fruit — is the greatest work of social medicine that has been done in Cuba.

The battle against disease should be based on the principle of creating a robust body — not creating a robust body through a doctor’s artistic work on a weak organism, but creating a robust body through the world of the whole collectivity, especially the whole social collectivity.

One day medicine will have to become a science that serves to prevent diseases, to orient the entire public toward their medical obligations, and that intervention is only necessary in cases of extreme urgency to perform some surgical operation or to deal with something uncharacteristic of that new society we are creating.

The work that is today entrusted to the Ministry of Health, to all the institutions of this type, is to organize public health in such a manner that it aids the greatest possible number of people, that it prevents everything foreseeable related to diseases, and that it orients the people. But for the organizational task, as for all revolutionary tasks, what is required, fundamentally, is the individual. The revolution is not, as some claim, a standardizer of collective will, of collective initiative. To the contrary, it is a liberator of an individual’s capacity.

What the revolution does do, however, is to orient that capacity. And our task today is to orient the creative talent of all the medical professionals toward the tasks of social medicine.

We are at the end of an era, and not only here in Cuba. Despite all that is said to the contrary and despite all the hopes of some people, the forms of capitalism we have known, under which we have been raised and have suffered, are being defeated throughout the world.

The monopolies are being defeated. Collective science every day registers new and important triumphs. And we have had the pride and the self-sacrificing duty of being the vanguard in Latin America of a liberation movement that began some time ago, in the other subjugated continents of Africa and Asia. And that very profound social change also demands very profound changes in the mentality of the people.

Individualism as such, as the isolated action of a person alone in a social environment, must disappear in Cuba. Individualism tomorrow should be the proper utilization of the whole person to the absolute benefit of the community. But even when all this is understood today, even when these things I am saying are comprehended, and even when everyone is willing to think a little about the present, about the past, and about what the future should be, changing the manner of thinking requires profound internal changes and helping bring about profound external changes, primarily social.

And those external changes are taking place in Cuba every day. One way of learning about this revolution, of getting to know the forces the people have within, forces that have been dormant for so long, is to visit every part of Cuba, visit the cooperatives and all the work centers being created. And one way of getting to the heart of the medical question is not only knowing, not only visiting these places, but also getting to know the people who make up these cooperatives and work centers. Go there and find out what diseases they have, what their ailments are, what extreme poverty they have lived in over the years, inherited from centuries of repression and total submission. The doctor, the medical worker, should then go to the heart of this new work, which is as a person among the masses, someone within the community.

Whatever happens in the world, by always being close to the patient, by knowing their psychology so deeply, by being the representative of those who come near pain and relieve it, the doctor always has a very important job, a job of great responsibility in social life.

Only a few months ago, it so happened here in Havana that a group of students, recently certified as doctors, did not want to go to the countryside and were demanding extra payment for going. From the viewpoint of the past it is most logical that this would occur; at least it seems that way to me, and I understand it perfectly. I simply remember that this was the way it was, the way it was regarded some years ago. Once more it is the gladiator in rebellion, the solitary fighter who wants to ensure a better future, better conditions, and to achieve recognition of the necessity of what he does.

But what would happen if it were not those kids — the majority of whose families could afford several years of study — who completed their courses and are now beginning to practice their profession? What if instead it was 200 or 300 peasants who had emerged, let’s say by magic, from the university lecture halls?

What would have happened, simply, is that those peasants would have run immediately, and with great enthusiasm, to attend to their brothers and sisters. They would have requested posts with the most responsibility and the most work, in order to show that the years of study given them were not in vain. What would have happened is what will happen within six or seven years, when the new students, children of the working class and the peasantry, receive their professional degrees of whatever type.

But we should not view the future with fatalism and divide people into children of the working class or peasantry and counterrevolutionaries. Because that is simplistic, because it is not true, and because there is nothing that educates an honorable person more than living within a revolution.

Because none of us, none of the first group that arrived in the Granma, who established ourselves in the Sierra Maestra, and who learned to respect the peasant and the worker, living together with them — none of us had had a past as a worker or peasant. Naturally, there were those who had to work, who had known certain wants in their childhood. But hunger, true hunger — that none of us had known, and we began to know it — temporarily — during the two long years in the Sierra Maestra. And then many things became very clear.

We, who at the beginning severely punished anyone who touched even an egg of some rich peasant or some landowner, one day took 10,000 head of cattle to the Sierra and told the peasants simply: “Eat.” And the peasants, for the first time in many years, and some for the first time in their lives, ate beef.

And the respect we had for the sacrosanct property of those 10,000 head of cattle was lost in the course of the armed struggle, and we understood perfectly that the life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth. And we learned it there, we who were not children of the working class or the peasantry. So why should we now shout to the four winds that we are the privileged ones and that the rest of the Cuban people cannot learn too? Yes, they can learn. In fact, the revolution today demands that they learn, demands that they understand well that the pride of serving our fellow human beings is much more important than a good income; that the people’s gratitude is much more permanent, much more lasting than all the gold one can accumulate. And each doctor, in the sphere of their activity, can and should accumulate that prized treasure, the people’s gratitude.

We must then begin to erase our old concepts and come even closer and ever more critically to the people. Not in the way we got closer before, because all of you will say: “No, I am a friend of the people. I enjoy talking with workers and peasants, and on Sundays I go to such and such a place to see such and such a thing.” Everybody has done that. But they have done it practicing charity, and what we have to practice today is solidarity. We should not draw closer to the people to say: “Here we are. We come to give you the charity of our presence, to teach you with our science, to demonstrate your errors, your lack of refinement, your lack of elementary knowledge.” We should go with an investigative zeal and with a humble spirit, to learn from the great source of wisdom that is the people.

Often we realize how mistaken we were in concepts we knew so well; they had become part of us and, automatically, of our consciousness. Every so often we ought to change all our ideas, not just general, social or philosophical concepts, but also, at times, our medical concepts. We will see that diseases are not always treated as one treats an illness in a big-city hospital. We will see then that the doctor also has to be a farmer, that one has to learn to cultivate new foods and, by their example, to cultivate the desire to consume new foods, to diversify this food structure in Cuba — so small and so poor in an agricultural country that is potentially the richest on earth. We will then see that under those circumstances we will have to be a little bit pedagogic, at times very pedagogic, that we will also have to be politic; that the first thing we will have to do is not go offering our wisdom, but showing that we are ready to learn with the people, to carry out that great and beautiful common experience — to build a new Cuba.

We have already taken many steps, and the distance between that January 1, 1959, and today cannot be measured in the conventional manner. It was some time ago that the people understood that not only had a dictator fallen here, but that a system had fallen as well. Now the people should learn that upon the ruins of a crumbled system, one must build a new one that brings about the people’s absolute happiness.

I remember when Compañero [Nicolás] Guillén arrived from Argentina early last year. He was the same great poet he is today — perhaps his books were translated into one fewer language, because every day he wins new readers in all the languages of the world — but he was the same as today. But it was difficult for Guillén to read his poems, which were the poems of the people, because that was the first period, the period of prejudices. Nobody ever stopped to think that for years and years, with incorruptible dedication, the poet Guillén had put all his extraordinary artistic gifts at the service of the people and at the service of the cause he believed in. The people saw in him not the glory of Cuba, but the representative of a political party that was taboo. But all that is behind us. We have already learned that we cannot have divisions based on opinions about certain internal structures in our country, if we have a common enemy and if we are trying to reach a common goal.

We all know that we have definitively become convinced that there is a common enemy. We know that everyone looks around to see if someone will hear him, if someone is listening from some embassy who will transmit their opinion, before clearly stating an opinion against the monopolies, before saying clearly: “Our enemy, and the enemy of all Latin America, is the monopolistic government of the United States of America.”

If everybody already knows that this is the enemy, and if our starting point is knowing that whoever struggles against that enemy has something in common with us, then comes the second part. What are our goals here in Cuba? What do we want? Do we want the people’s happiness or not? Are we struggling for Cuba’s absolute economic liberation or not? Are we or are we not struggling to be a free country among free countries, without belonging to any military bloc, without having to consult any embassy of any great power on earth about any domestic or foreign decision we make? Are we thinking of redistributing the wealth of those who have too much, to give to those who have nothing? Are we thinking here of making work a creative task, a dynamic daily source of all our happiness? If so, then we already have goals to which we referred. And everyone who shares those goals is our friend. If that person also has other ideas, if they belong to one or another [political] organization, those are discussions of lesser importance.

At times of great danger, at times of great tensions and great creativity, what counts are the great enemy and the great goals. If we agree, if we all already know where we are going, then whatever happens, we must begin our work.

I was telling you that to be a revolutionary requires having a revolution. We already have [a revolution]. And a revolutionary must also know the people with whom they work. I think we still don’t know one another well. I think we still have to travel a while along that road. If someone asks me how to go about getting to know the people, in addition to going into the interior [of the country], learning about cooperatives, living in cooperatives (and not everybody can do that, and there are many places where the presence of a medical doctor is very important) … in those cases, I will tell you that one of the Cuban people’s greatest expressions of solidarity is the revolutionary militias, militias that now give doctors a new function and prepare them for what was at least until recently a sad and almost fatal reality in Cuba: that is, that we were going to be prey — or if not prey at least victims — of a large-scale armed attack.

As a revolutionary militia member, the doctor should be warned to always be a doctor. They should not commit the error we made in the Sierra — or perhaps it was not an error, but all the doctor compañeros of that period know it — that it appeared dishonorable for us to be at the side of a wounded or ill person, and we sought any means possible to grab a rifle and show on the battlefield what should be done.

Now conditions are different. The new armies being formed to defend the country should be armies that use different methods, as part of which the doctor will have an enormous importance. They should continue being doctors, which is one of the most beautiful and most important tasks of war.

And not just doctors, but also nurses, laboratory technicians, all those who dedicate themselves to this humane profession.

But all of us — even knowing that the danger is latent and even while preparing to repel the aggression that still hangs over us — should stop thinking about that. Because if we center our efforts on war preparations, we cannot build what we want, we cannot devote ourselves to creative work.

All work, all capital that is invested in preparing for military action, is labor lost, money lost. Unfortunately, it has to be done, because there are others preparing. But the money I am most saddened to see leave the National Bank coffers — and I say this with all honesty and pride as a soldier — is the money to pay for some weapon of destruction.

The militias have a function in peacetime, however. The militias should be, in populated areas, the arm that unifies and gets to know the people. They should practice real solidarity, as the compañeros have told me is being done in the medical militias. They should immediately set out to resolve the problems of the impoverished throughout Cuba at all times of danger. But they are also an opportunity to get to know one another, an opportunity to live alongside people of all Cuba’s social classes, made equal and made brothers by a common uniform.

If we achieve this, medical workers — and allow me to use again a term I had forgotten some time ago — if we all use that new weapon of solidarity, if we know the goals, if we know the enemy, and if we know the direction in which we have to travel, then the only thing left for us is to know the daily stretch of the road and to take it. Nobody can point out that stretch; that stretch is the personal road of each individual; it is what he or she will do every day, what a person will gain from their individual experience, and what they will give of themselves in practicing their profession, dedicated to the people’s well-being.

If we already possess all the elements with which to march toward the future, let us recall that phrase of Martí, which at this moment I am not putting into practice, but which we must constantly put into practice: “The best form of saying is doing.” And let us then march toward the future of Cuba. ■

Che and Medicine

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Che Guevara’s passion for public health contributed to his a legacy of social medicine in Latin America, and this book explores and reveals his thoughts on the role of a doctor.

Features an introduction by Aleida Guevara March, MD, a Cuban physician who is the eldest daughter of four children born to Ernesto “Che” Guevara and his second wife, Aleida March

Before Ernesto Che Guevara became “Che,” before he traveled Latin America, before he joined Fidel in Cuba, he was a medical school student. In 1956 he wrote to his mother before leaving to go and join the guerilla expedition to Cuba: “My path seems to be slowly but surely diverging from that of clinical medicine, but not so far that I have lost my nostalgia for hospitals. What I told you about the professorship in physiology was a lie, but not a big one. It was a lie because I never planned to accept it, but the offer was real and there was a strong possibility that they were going to give it to me, as I had an interview and everything. Anyway, that’s all history. Saint Carlos [Karl Marx] has made a new recruit.”

He had started a book on the role of the doctor in Latin America, a work he fully intended to continue writing. It remained incomplete at the time of his death in Bolivia at the age of thirty-nine, just eleven years later.

Below, we’ve shared a poem from the next, as well as Jaime Barba’s introduction to the collection. In his introduction, Barba places this text, as well as other texts by Roque Dalton, within the larger political climates of Central America during the late 1960s and 1970s. In doing so, he presents a collection that shows a country caught in the crosshairs of American imperialism, where the few rule the many and the many fight to survive—and yet there is love and humor and self-mockery to be found here on every page, in every verse, as well as an abiding faith in humanity.

“I believe the world is beautiful,” Dalton writes, “and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.”

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Tercer poema de amor

A quienes te digan que nuestro amor es extraordinario
porque ha nacido de circunstancias extraordinarias
diles que precisamente luchamos
para que un amor como el nuestro
(amor entre compañeros de combate)
llegue a ser en El Salvador
el amor más común y corriente,
casi el único.

Third Poem of Love

Whoever tells you our love is extraordinary
because it was born of extraordinary circumstances
tell them we’re struggling precisely
so that a love like ours
(a love among comrades in combat)
becomes the most ordinary and common
almost the only love
in El Salvador.

The New Word Is Risk: Introduction to Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases / Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle

By Jamie Barba

It is difficult to say whether Roque Dalton finished Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle in April 1975, since he was assassinated around May 10 of that year. It would be better to say that this collection of poems is truncated, like its author’s life.

Roque was already a well-known writer when he entered El Salvador clandestinely via the Ilopango International Airport of San Salvador, on December 24, 1973, under the name Julio Delfos Marín, to become a combatant in the People’s Revolutionary Army, one of the guerrilla organizations that began operations in the early 1970s.

The testimonial narrative Miguel Mármol: The events of 1932 in El Salvador [Miguel Mármol. Los sucesos de 1932 en El Salvador] had finally been published in Costa Rica at the end of 1972. This book was a milestone in the reconstruction of Salvadoran political history.

In January 1971, a preview of the book—chapters IV, VI, and VII—appeared in the journal Pensamiento Crítico in Havana and then in the magazine La Universidad in San Salvador (March–April 1972). Moreover, before his return to his native country, Dalton had submitted what is perhaps his most important literary achievement, The Forbidden Stories of Tom Thumb [Las historias prohibidas del Pulgarcito] (1974), to the publisher Siglo XXI Editores.

So, in 1973, Roque is neither an unknown person nor an unpublished author. But his avatar is tied to that of his country in a way that is now almost cabalistic. In November 1972, Miguel Mármol was published in Costa Rica and not in El Salvador, because on July 19, 1972, Salvadoran Army troops entered the National University and closed it down. The dean, secretary general, and attorney general, as well as various chairpersons and professors of the university were apprehended by the authorities and sent into exile. In fact, they were the last Salvadorans to be exiled; from then on, the punishment for dissent was machine-gunning, persecution, and murder.

In the 1970s, El Salvador entered a new political cycle, which in March 1972 was aggravated by a scandalous electoral fraud against the National Opposition Union, a coalition of progressive groups. The situation devolved a few days later, on March 25, when a coup d’état which sought to restore the democracy violated by fraud was suppressed.

The die was cast when the spaces for open debate were shut down. El Salvador was heading for war. Dalton deciphered those signs in Havana and set out on a hasty but premeditated return.

The man who must be recognized as the most daring and innovative Salvadoran writer and intellectual of the twentieth century gave it his all and threw himself into the flames. Immolation? No. Suicide? Not at all. Was he afraid? Surely, but to those who say this I quote Rubén Darío’s response to accusations of being a mere romantic: “We are romantic. Who that lives is not?”

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle is an urgent book that can be understood as the willful action of a poet who cannot stop recording, even at the risk of suffocating, the tumult of decisive events of which he is a part. This is also a book of confirmations. Roque thus lends continuity, in the midst of the clandestine flow in which he forges his days, to a line of poetic creation that perhaps starts with Very Personal Texts and Poems [Textos y poemas muy personales] (written between 1963 and 1965) and culminates in the poem-collage that he left unpublished before his final goodbye, A Red Book for Lenin [Un libro rojo para Lenin] (completed in 1973). Some critics have described Stories and Poems as decadent and pamphleteering. They forget the context in which it was articulated, and the vein from which it flows.

It goes without saying that this collection of poems does not reveal a concrete reality (poetry, as Roque Dalton knows perfectly well, has another mission) or a precise polemic, but a vital attitude. Yes, here the author is having fun ranting, disqualifying, mocking. He is celebrating his return to El Salvador in the midst of a hailstorm of bullets. He is affirming himself. He is neither tragic nor pathetic; he prefers his corrosive good humor to the mournful singsong that the pitiful bard has already forgotten. Here Dalton affirms that the new word is risk.

Revisiting this book thirty-four years after it was written, one gets the feeling that Roque, in his determined political zeal, not only communicates his reasons but is also aware that every day may be his last. That is why these pages have a strange power: they evoke situations, announce collisions, propose boundaries.

But Stories and Poems is also a literary artifact that must be understood in relation to the era in Central American history that it was enmeshed in.

In the political arena, in Nicaragua and Guatemala, as in El Salvador, an energy had been unleashed that created new horizons of structural transformation. By 1973, in Nicaragua, the perspective of change had regained its strategic spirit and was redirected toward more tangible objectives. In January 1972, a “new guerilla” contingent entered Guatemala through Ixcán and, a few years later, became the Guerilla Army of the Poor.

In Cuba, from 1968 to 1971, Roque Dalton actively participated, alongside Nicaraguans (led by Carlos Fonseca Amador, “Agatón”) and Guatemalans (led by Ricardo Ramírez de León, “Orlando Fernández,” and “Rolando Morán”), in discussions that sought to reconfigure guerilla warfare.

In fact, Dalton was linked to the People’s Revolutionary Army as early as 1971 and had a specific assignment in Cuba. Thus, he was already a subject of discussion upon his return to El Salvador.

Roque Dalton was not a spectator in Havana. He forged ideas, informed himself, debated, promoted initiatives. He wrote like a man possessed, and not only poetry as some maliciously pontificated. He traveled here and there, sniffed out paths, explored vistas, all without having a perfectly delineated map, as only true adventurers do. All of which is recorded in this collection of poems.

In Tavern and Other Places [Taberna y otros lugares] (1969), he found a truthful point of view for his poetry; in The Forbidden Stories of Tom Thumb, he demystified and inaugurated poetic discourses; in A Red Book for Lenin, he theorized about poetry. In Stories and Poems, Dalton accelerated the pace and began to sing in chorus a dissonant song.

Following the path of Bertolt Brecht, an author dear to Roque, and playing with heteronyms (as Fernando Pessoa did in his time, in another context of course), Dalton in Stories and Poems faces the mellifluous Parnassus and the mediocre political-body-that-requires-blood-sweat-and-tears. The book demands and exposes.

To read this book as a list of pains and sorrows would be to miss the point that modern poetry, composed here by an author who is pushing up to the existential limits, has as its main objective to continue the tradition of rupture.

When considering Roque Dalton’s poetic output, one is always at risk of wanting to restrict it to such and such characteristics. Because when considering this book alone, one might think that all roads are closed for Dalton’s poetics. It is true, that not all the poems in this volume have the same level of formal elaboration. Had the author survived, he probably would have left out certain texts, added others, and even rewritten a good part of them. That was his practice as a responsible writer.

Now as I write, in 2023, perhaps some poems or, for some persnickety people, the whole of Stories and Poems may be considered out of focus, because of the insolent and merciless way Dalton deals with themes and problems, even characters. But is it not similar to what he did in The Forbidden Stories of Tom Thumb?

By 1974, the year in which most of the poems in Stories and Poems seem to have been forged (his explicit references suggest so), Roque is neither a dilettante writer nor a novice political activist. He is living a spectacular moment in his life, a circumstance longed for and desperately sought since at least 1971, when he realized that another political moment had opened up in his country. He did not come to pay a debt but to adopt the position he believed to be appropriate in that difficult period for El Salvador. He could have declined or used various imaginary pretexts to postpone his return until the political climate was mild. He preferred to take the thorny path.

This book is not a testament but a poetic testimony. Here the poet does not stop being a poet—rather, he raises the flag of poetry to tell us what his skin / his mind / his guts are experiencing in that political circumstance.

Salvadoran poetry and Central American poetry have come a long way since 1975, and it cannot be said that they have only addressed the literary problems raised by Dalton. However, it is undeniable that Roque’s poetics introduced substantive novelties that have exerted and will surely continue to exert an outsized influence on the region’s literary creation, for his courage and also for his irreverence.

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle in no sense constitutes a failed literary endeavor on the part of Roque Dalton. It must be read as a bold yet cautious act unfolding in a context where words count but deeds are decisive. These poems are about that. This book, it must be stated without ambiguity, contains the essence of Roque Dalton’s literary program, that of an author who, at the age of forty, does not hesitate to start from scratch.

When one considers Dalton’s literary trajectory, of which his extensive bibliography provides ample testimony, it is evident that the author is constantly concerned with themes that hold the possibility of a shipwreck. Only a creator whose intellectual disposition demands that he take huge risks could dare to jump over the obstacles without wincing in pain. The material in this book comes out of this frame of mind.

Time has passed. The literary production of Roque Dalton circulates freely. His writing style and ethos point to complexity and, in certain parts, to obscurity. But his word, the ever-living poetry of which he was a devoted practitioner, is alive.

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle, signaled by certain critics and pundits as a book of little account, should be seen as an ugly duckling. It keeps turning up, revealing a pulsing world, and giving an account of the saga of an audacious and energetic creator.

—Jaime Barba
San Salvador, Central America
March 2023

Poems of revolution by one of Latin America’s most beloved poets

“The revolutionary the dictatorship couldn’t kill, the trickster poet favored by the gods.” —Ben Ehrenreich, author of The Way to Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

“It feels apt that, nearly 50 years after his death, Dalton’s work is being reprinted alongside a burgeoning generation of Salvadoran writers. He was a revolutionary poet and part of La Generación Comprometida, one of the most important literary movements in Salvadoran history.” —Christopher Soto, Los Angeles Times

“Roque Dalton’s Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases (Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle) dates back to 1975, and remains as timely as ever. In a time when most Central American countries are under authoritarian regimes and have experienced backslides of democracy, the life and work of Roque Dalton is at once a beacon of hope, an inspiration, and a warning sign. Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases is a book filled with courageous testimony, the poet’s typical dry humor, and bone-chilling depictions of state violence. Here, Dalton is hyperaware of the pain and plight of his compatriots, but in addition to his typical grittiness and social critique, we also find tenderness, softness, beauty, and frailty; Dalton’s acute perception is both a rifle and a compass, manifesting in words of both rebuke and encouragement.” —Asymptote

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“Repression can really only live off fear. But is fear enough to remove need, thirst for justice, intelligence, reason, idealism…? Relying on intimidation, the reactionaries forget that they will cause more indignation, more hatred, more thirst for martyrdom, than real fear. They only intimidate the weak; they exasperate the best forces and temper the resolution of the strongest.” —Victor Serge

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THE PROBLEM OF ILLEGALITY

An Excerpt from What Every Radical Should Know about State Repression: A Guide for Activists by Victor Serge

DON’T BE FOOLED

Without a clear perspective on this problem, knowledge of police methods and procedures would be of no practical utility.

Fetishism of legality was and still is one of the characteristic features of the class collaboration tendency of socialism. It involves a belief in the possibility of transforming the capitalist order without entering into conflict with its privileged elements. But rather than indicating a naiveté quite incompatible with the mentality of politicians, it is a sign of the corruption of the leaders. Entrenched in a society they pretend to be fighting, they recommend respecting the rules of the game. The working class can only respect bourgeois legality if it ignores the real role of the state and the deceptive nature of democracy; in short, the first principles of the class struggle.

If the worker knows that the state is a mesh of institutions designed to defend the interests of the property owners against the non-owners, that is, to maintain the exploitation of labor; that the law, always decreed by the rich against the poor, is enforced by magistrates invariably belonging to the ruling class; that the law is invariably enforced along rigorous class lines; that coercion, which begins with a quiet order from a policeman, passes via the lockup and the penitentiary, and ends with the fall of the guillotine—is the systematic exercise of legalized violence against the exploited, then the only way the worker can view legality is as a fact, whose different facets he should know about, with its different applications, traps and pitfalls (and also advantages, which should be made use of at certain points) but which should be nothing but a purely material obstacle to his class.

Is it necessary to demonstrate the anti-proletarian nature of all bourgeois legality? Perhaps. In our unequal struggle against the old world, the simplest things must be explained again and again each day. We need only mention a number of fairly well-known facts.

In every country, the workers’ movement has had to win, in over half a century of struggle, the right to associate and the right to strike. Even in France this right is still not conceded to state employed workers nor those in industries considered to be of public utility (as if all industries aren’t), such as the railways.

In the conflicts between capital and labor, the army has often intervened against labor—never against capital.

In court the defense of the poor is nothing short of impossible, because of the cost of any judicial action; in effect, a worker can neither bring a case nor defend one.

The overwhelming majority of crimes are directly caused by poverty and come into the category of attacks on property. The overwhelming majority of prison inmates are from the poor.

Up until the war, there was discriminatory suffrage in Belgium; a capitalist, a curate, an officer or a lawyer each had as many votes as two, or three workers. At the time of writing an attempt is being made to reestablish discriminatory suffrage in Italy.

To respect legality such as this is to be fooled by it. Nonetheless, it would be equally disastrous to ignore it. The advantages for the workers’ movement are the greater the less one is fooled. The right to exist and to act legally is, for the organizations of the proletariat, something which must constantly be re-won and extended. We stress this because sometimes among good revolutionaries there emerges the diametrical opposite of fetishizing legality—due to a kind of tendency to make the least political effort (it is easier to conspire than to lead mass action) they have a certain disdain for legal action.

We believe that in countries where the reaction has not yet triumphed, destroying the previous democratic constitution, the workers will have to fight to defend every inch of their legal position, and in other countries fight to regain it. In France itself, the legal status the workers’ movement enjoys must be extended, and this can only be done through struggle. The right of association and the right to strike are still denied to state employees and certain other categories of workers; the right to demonstrate is much more restricted than in the Anglo-Saxon countries; the advanced guard of workers’ defense have still not conquered the streets and gained legality as in Germany and Austria.

THE POSTWAR EXPERIENCE

During the war the governments of all the belligerent countries replaced democratic institutions by military dictatorship (martial law, the virtual suppression of the right to strike, prorogation or recess of parliaments, handing over all power to the generals and the court-martial regimes). The exceptional requirements of national defense gave them a plausible justification. Since the end of the war, when the Red tide surging out from Russia flowed out over the whole of Europe, almost all the capitalist states—this time fighting the class war, and under threat from the workers’ movement— treated their previously sacred legislation as worth less than the paper it was written on.

The Baltic states (Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia) and Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia brought out against the working class brutal laws untainted with democratic hypocrisy. Bulgaria refined the effects of its brutal legislation with extra-legal violence. Hungary, Italy and Spain were content with abolishing, so far as the workers and peasants were concerned, any legality whatsoever. More cultivated, and better organized, Germany, without resorting to special powers, established what can be called a regime of legal police terror.[1] The United States brutally applies its laws on “criminal unionism,” sabotage and . . . espionage! Thousands of workers were arrested under an Espionage Act passed during the war against German subjects living in the United States.

The only countries left in Europe where the labor movement still enjoys the benefits of democratic legality are Scandinavia, England, France and a few small countries. It can be said without fear of being disproved by events that with the first really dangerous social crisis this advantage will be promptly and abruptly withdrawn. Very definite signs have appeared which demand our attention. In November 1924, the British elections took place on the basis of an anticommunist campaign, the basic evidence for which was a forged letter from Zinoviev, supposedly addressed to the British Labour Party and intercepted by the state. In France there have on several occasions been attempts to dissolve the CGT. If I am not mistaken, this dissolution even received formal approval. Briand in his time even—illegally—went so far as to militarize railway workers, in order to break their strike. Clemenceau’s tactics are not something belonging to the distant past—and Poincaré has shown, since the occupation of the Ruhr, an evident desire to imitate him.

Now, for a revolutionary party, being taken unawares by being outlawed means that you disappear. On the other hand, being prepared for illegality makes you certain of surviving any measures of repression. Three striking examples from recent history illustrate the truth of this.

1. A great communist party which allowed itself to be taken unawares when made illegal:

The Yugoslav Communist Party, a mass party, which in 1920 had more than 120,000 members and sixty deputies in the Skupchina, was dissolved in 1921, in compliance with the State Defense Law. Its defeat was instant and total. It disappeared from the political scene.[2]

2. A communist party which was taken only half unawares:

The Italian Communist Party [PCI] was obliged, even before Mussolini’s rise to power, to pursue what was at best a semi-legal existence, because of fascist persecution. The furious repression—with 4,000 workers arrested in the first week of 1923— was at no point able to smash the PCI, which on the contrary was strengthened and fortified, its membership rising from 10,000 in 1923 to almost 30,000 at the beginning of 1925.

3. A great communist party which was not in the least taken unawares:

At the end of 1923, after the revolutionary events of October and the Hamburg insurrection, the German Communist Party was dissolved by General von Seeckt. Prepared over a long period, and with flexible, illegal organizations, it was none-theless able to continue its normal existence. The government soon had to reconsider a measure of such evident inanity. The German Communist Party came out of illegality with its forces hardly impaired, to get over three and a half million votes in the 1924 elections.

THE LIMITS OF LEGAL REVOLUTIONARY ACTION

What is more, legality, in the most “advanced” capitalist democracies, has limits which the proletariat cannot respect without condemning itself to defeat. Propaganda in the army, a vital necessity, is not legally tolerated. Without the defection of at least a part of the army, there is no victorious revolution. This is a law of history. In every bourgeois army, the party of the proletariat must arouse and cultivate revolutionary traditions, possess extensive organizations, tenacious in their work, and more vigilant than the enemy. The most democratic of legal systems would not in the least tolerate action committees at the very points where they are most necessary: in the great railway junctions, the docks, the arsenals and the airports. The most democratic of legal systems does not tolerate communist propaganda in the colonies: as proof, take the persecution of the Egyptian and Indian revolutionaries by the British authorities; and also the regime of police provocation established by the French authorities in Tunisia. Finally, it need scarcely be said that international communications services must at all times be subject to investigation by the political police.

Nobody maintained the need for illegal revolutionary organization more firmly than Lenin—in the period of the founding of the Russian Bolshevik Party and later, during the founding of the European communist parties. Nobody fought harder against the fetishism of legality. At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democracy (in Brussels and London, 1903), the division between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks took shape precisely over the question of illegal organization. The motive was the discussion of the first paragraph of the statutes. L. Martov, who for 20 years was to be the leader of Menshevism, wanted to concede membership of the party to anyone which lent it his services (under the control of the party)—that is, in reality, to the many sympathizers, especially in intellectual circles, who would try not to compromise themselves to the point of collaborating in illegal actions. Intractably, Lenin maintained that to belong to the party it was necessary “to participate in the work of one of its (illegal) organizations.” The discussion appeared to be splitting hairs. But Lenin was a thousand times right. You cannot be half, or a third a revolutionary. The party of the revolution must, of course, make use of every contribution; but it cannot be content with receiving just vague, discreet, verbal, inactive sympathy from its members. Those who do not agree to risk a privileged material situation for the sake of the working class, should not be in a position to exercise real influence within it. The attitude towards illegality was for Lenin the touchstone for differentiating between real revolutionaries and others.[3]

PRIVATE POLICE FORCES

Another factor must be taken into account: the existence of private police forces outside the law that provide the bourgeoisie with excellent hired guns.

During the world war, the information service of Action Française was notably successful in supplying Clemenceau’s courts-martial. It is well known that Marius Plateau was at the head of AF’s private police. Meanwhile, a certain Jean Maxe,[4] the zealous compiler and distributor of the Cahiersdel’antifrance, devoted himself to spying on the vanguard movements. It is very likely that all the reactionary formations inspired by the example of the Italian fascists have espionage and police services.

In Germany, since the official disarming of the country, the essential forces of reaction have been concentrated in extremely secretive organizations. The reaction has understood that, even in parties supported by the state, clandestinity is a precious asset. Naturally all these organizations take on the functions of virtual undercover police forces against the proletariat.

In Italy, the fascist party is not content with having the official police at its disposal. It has its own espionage and counterespionage services. Everywhere it spreads informers, secret agents, provocateurs and police spies. And it is this mafia, police and terrorists all in one, which “suppressed” Matteotti—as it had many others.

In the United States, the participation of the private police in the conflicts between labor and capital has grown fearfully. The offices of famous private detectives provide the capitalists with discreet informers, expert provocateurs, riflemen, guards, foremen and also totally corrupt “trade union militants.” The Pinkertons, Burns and Thiels detective agencies have 100 head offices and about 10,000 branches: they supposedly employ 135,000 people. Their annual budget comes to $65 million. They have set up industrial espionage, factory-floor espionage, espionage in the workshop, the shipyards, offices, and wherever there are workers employed. They have created the prototype of the worker-informer. [5]

An analogous system, exposed by Upton Sinclair, operates in the universities and schools of the great democracy whose praises are sung by Walt Whitman.

CONCLUSIONS

To sum up: the study of the workings of the Okhrana shows us that the immediate aim of the police is more to know than to repress. To know in order to repress at the appointed hour, to the extent desired—if not altogether. Faced by this wily adversary, powerful and cunning, a workers’ party lacking clandestine organization, a party which keeps nothing hidden, is like an unarmed man, with no cover, in the sights of a well positioned rifleman. Revolutionary work is too serious to be kept in a glasshouse. The party of the revolution must organize so as to avoid enemy vigilance as far as possible; so as to hide its most important resources absolutely; so as not—in the countries which are still democratic—to be at the mercy of a lurch to the right by the bourgeoisie, or of a declaration of war so as to train our comrades in the behavior which is demanded by these imperatives. [6]

VICTOR SERGE was born to Russian émigré parents in Belgium in 1890. He became active at an early age in revolutionary activities, for which he was imprisoned for five years in France. On his release he returned to revolutionary Russia where he threw himself into the defense of the fledgling government. After Lenin’s death he became increasingly alienated from Stalin’s clique and was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1936 for speaking out against the purges. He died in exile in Mexico in 1947. He wrote numerous novels, poems, memoirs and political essays. Prefiguring Solzhenitsyn by 40 years, Serge believed: “He who speaks, he who writes is above all one who speaks on behalf of all those who have no voice.”

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WHAT EVERY RADICAL SHOULD KNOW ABOUT STATE REPRESSION: A Guide for Activists

By Victor Serge

This classic manual on repression by revolutionary activist Victor Serge offers fascinating anecdotes about the tactics of police provocateurs and an analysis of the documents of the Tsarist secret police in the aftermath of the Russian revolution.

As we approach the 100th anniversary of Victor Serge’s (1926) classic exposé of political repression, the specter of fear as a tool of political repression is chillingly familiar to us in world increasingly threatened by totalitarianism. Serge’s exposé of the surveillance methods used by the Czarist police reads like a spy thriller. An irrepressible rebel, Serge wrote this manual for political activists, describing the structures of state repression and how to dodge them—including how to avoid being followed, what to do if arrested, and tips on securing correspondence. He also explains how such repression is ultimately ineffective.

“Repression can really only live off fear. But is fear enough to remove need, thirst for justice, intelligence, reason, idealism…? Relying on intimidation, the reactionaries forget that they will cause more indignation, more hatred, more thirst for martyrdom, than real fear. They only intimidate the weak; they exasperate the best forces and temper the resolution of the strongest.” —Victor Serge

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EDITORIAL NOTE

For many readers around the world, the publication of the essential writings of historic figures has a high symbolic value, given that they represent a perspective on a particular era and, in turn, a form of living memory of the author themselves.

This is one of the aims behind this publication of Guerrilla Warfare, which was written by Che Guevara between 1960 and 1961, and published immediately. The book, however, has its own history and evolution that, we venture to say, has surpassed the expectations of its author, who by preparing a manual on guerrilla warfare intended to systematize rules, to theorize a practical experience (the guerrilla struggle in Cuba), define its structures, and draw out some generalizations.

Due to this book’s form, content, and Che’s sharp and concise style, it very soon found an echo in the revolutionary movements of the 1960s, reflected in Che’s description of the new type of guerrilla fighter and the essential role that they should play as a social reformer and catalyst for full social justice.

This clearly explains why the manual very soon also became a widely studied text in US counterinsurgency schools and military academies.

The course of historical events led Che to embark on a new front in the struggle in the Congo in 1965, his memories of which are recorded in Congo Diary (Seven Stories Press, 2021). This experience, despite the importance of its objectives, did not produce the expected results; a retreat was forced upon Che and the Cuban combatants who had been mobilized to support the struggle following a request made by the Organization of African Unity. It was decided that Che would leave the Congo, first to travel to Tanzania and later to Prague, the place chosen for the preparation of future battles. He remained in Prague until July 1966, when he returned incognito to Cuba to begin the military training that would lead him to Bolivia.

During his time in Prague, among the tasks Che assumed was a revision of Guerrilla Warfare, based on a suggestion made by Fidel Castro in a letter dated June 3, 1966.

Fidel wrote:

I read the entire draft of the book about your experience in the C.* and reread the manual on guerrilla warfare, so as to be able to make the best possible analysis… Although in an immediate sense, there is no point in talking to you about these issues, for the time being I will limit myself to telling you that I found the work on the C. extremely interesting and I think that the effort you made to leave a written account of everything was really worthwhile. In relation to the manual on guerrilla warfare, it seems to me that it should be updated a bit in view of the new experiences accumulated in the field, to introduce some new ideas and to emphasize certain questions that are absolutely fundamental.

* Fidel is referring to the Congo, Africa.

Che had very little time for revising the text between receiving the letter from Fidel and the date of his return to Cuba, which explains the mechanisms used for the changes that were introduced, especially in terms of his suggestions for a future and more complete expansion of the text. The method used maintained the style that Che always employed — the use of several colors (red, blue, and green) — as well as annotations in the margin pointing to the need to consult, consider, and expand on different points. Many of the notes remained on the level of mere observations that could not be developed for obvious reasons. At the same time, the comprehensive and temporal vision of Che’s new observations is displayed, for example, when he writes, “correct this in accordance with the Vietnamese [experience].”

Given the testimonial and historical value of the annotations made by Che, the present edition of Guerrilla Warfare incorporates them with their corresponding explanations and places them in boldface in the text and footnotes, so as to make them more intelligible to the reader.

The Che Guevara Studies Center and Ocean Press, as part of their joint publishing project, and particularly in relation to Che’s classic texts, wish to offer the reader the definitive, albeit unfinished version of a work that is always present and permanently being renewed, as Che suggested in the first edition in his dedication to Camilo: “This work is dedicated to Camilo Cienfuegos, who should have read and corrected it, but whose fate prevented him from carrying out the task.”

The editors

FOREWORD BY HARRY “POMBO” VILLEGAS

The request of the Che Guevara Studies Center to prepare a few brief notes for a foreword to the new edition of Che’s Guerrilla Warfare, which he later updated during his stay in Prague after the end of his campaign in the Congo, represents for me an immense commitment.

Che’s theoretical creativity, characterized by his multidisciplinary approach and backed by his coherent practice in relation to his ideas, offers for progressive people throughout the world — and especially the young — unquestionable guiding values. This is why the desire expressed in the Cuban Pioneers’ slogan to “be like Che” continues to be valid for almost all of humanity in its quest for full social justice.

Demonstrating the versatile nature of Che’s creative activity, Guerrilla Warfare brings together the theoretical-practical experience of the revolutionary war in Cuba, synthesizing the strategy and tactics of the Cuban revolution during the struggle for power. The book also brings together the military thinking behind that process in the insurrectional stage, and the military activities of Fidel Castro as its leader, and its vanguard of Raúl Castro, Juan Almeida, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Che Guevara. It was Che who assumed responsibility for objectively analyzing and generalizing this experience, with the aim of providing the necessary theoretical framework that is indispensable for those who in the future might adopt this method of struggle.

For many analysts of revolutionary war in different parts of the world, Guerrilla Warfare is one of the texts that discusses the topic most systematically.

Since its first publication, these qualities have not escaped the attention of US military analysts, who have incorporated it as a text to be studied and used in the preparation of counterinsurgency forces (such as the Green Berets). These forces were created and trained as a military response to the upsurge in revolutionary movements— and especially the guerrilla struggles that were developing in Latin America — following the victory of the Cuban revolution.

As is obvious, the validity of the ideas contained in this book was recognized by the empire’s think tanks when they were analyzing the causes that generated this phenomenon in Cuba. They have also studied the strategic alternatives proposed by the leaders of the Cuban revolution in relation to changes that should be incorporated in light of new experiences of social transformation.

The imperialist enemy has tried to respond and offer possible ways to combat these ideas. One such initiative was the so-called Alliance for Progress, which was established in 1961 with the objective of preventing a repetition of the Cuban revolution elsewhere in the region, arguing that it was an isolated or exceptional case. The objectives established after the victory of the revolution in 1959 are still being pursued today with new treaties such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which has the identical goals of subjugation and exploitation.

This explains why Che felt compelled to analyze the Cuban experience in light of revolutionary theory and practice in a way that could be applied to other peoples’ struggles. From this arose the need for Guerrilla Warfare to offer a methodology, a guide, and a way to take political power in Latin America through the means of armed struggle.

The starting point for the ideas underlying this manual are the conditions of exploitation prevailing in the region and their social consequences, conditions which generate illiteracy and inadequate health care, unemployment, and overwhelming impoverishment in almost all the countries of the hemisphere. This is the result of the domination imposed by governing oligarchies that are the unconditional allies of the United States, and that are responsible for obstructing the appropriate roads to resolving these scourges, thereby impeding a more just society.

Given the weight of such negative and harmful conditions, it was clear that there was no other alternative but to resort to violence in response to the intimidation that was imposed. Therefore, for Che, employing the guerrilla struggle was the most appropriate and certain road, although it was also the one that required the most sacrifice.

It should also be considered that the response conceptualized by Che was not only the concrete result of a revolutionary theory and practice, but was also an attempt to incorporate and apply a specific methodology and didactic approach to this form of struggle. Che seeks to clearly define the advantages of the method to be utilized to achieve success, in what are known as the “seven golden rules” of the guerrilla struggle, as well as to define the risks and dangers that might lead to failure.

Military thinking, in its theoretical dimension, is defined in revolutionary terms as the range of concepts, ideas, and principles held by an individual or group regarding the way to conduct war. In general, these experiences are imparted in writing, as in Che’s classic works such as Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (Seven Stories Press, 2022) and Congo Diary (Seven Stories Press, 2021), “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,” and this book, Guerrilla Warfare (Seven Stories Press, 2022).

Other methods are transmitted based on the experiences derived from practical activities, battles, military operations, and the conduct of war. In the concrete case of Cuba, the main example and maximum exponent of this is Fidel.

Many will ask, 45 years after Guerrilla Warfare was first published, whether the ideas proposed by Che retain their validity as the way to take political power under current conditions. To respond requires returning to the main lines of Che’s thought; as a Marxist, he offered an objective analysis and a coherent approach in dealing with reality in time, form, and space, which was indispensable for the analysis and elaboration of his political-military theses.

The possibility of applying these theses and achieving success in irregular warfare through the guerrilla struggle was based on the limited possibility of finding other ways to realize the dreams and ideals of the masses. For Che, the role of the guerrilla fighter was to be a catalyst that could accelerate the conditions of struggle among the people, consistent with the principle that the role of the revolutionary is not to sit back and wait to see the cadaver of imperialism pass by, but to facilitate the conditions that lead to its collapse.

For Cubans, the need for revolutionary war and its combative spirit remains valid as the only way to defend ourselves against our potential enemy, Yankee imperialism, and to preserve the revolution and the social justice we have achieved. This is implicit in our military doctrine of the War of All the People, a strategy designed to provide each citizen with a way of participating in the fight, by which guerrilla warfare continues to be a genuine mass struggle.

For Che, the people are to the guerrilla fighters what water is to a fish, that is, their means of existence. On the tactical level, the “seven golden rules” remain valid, in so far as if creatively applied they would guarantee victory:

• Do not engage in a fight that cannot be won.

• Move continuously, hit and run.

• Use the enemy as the main supplier of weapons.

• Hide your movements.

• Make use of the element of surprise in military actions.

• Form new columns once some power has been won.

• In general, proceed through three phases: strategic defense, balance between the possibilities of enemy action and guerrilla action, and finally the total annihilation of the adversary.

In short, all this is conducted using the tactics of the guerrilla: mobility, nocturnal movement, flexibility, ability to surprise, rapidity of attack, the care and rationing of supplies, and rapid alternation between concentrating efforts and decentralizing.

At the present time, as a result of the disintegration of the socialist camp, the dislocation of most of the forces of the left, and the consolidation of a hegemonic world order, the enemy has been forced, in the specific case of Latin America, to introduce superficial changes in its methods of oppression and colonial domination. Military dictatorships have been replaced by pseudo-democratic governments, subordinate, as always, to imperialism’s dictates and orders, making false promises to try to solve the serious problems that our people suffer as a result of neoliberalism and the consequences of underdevelopment — problems that the oligarchies and the transnationals have never been interested in solving.

In the case of progressive governments that have gained office through the electoral road, taking advantage of the so-called democratic opening, they have projected social programs with the aim of improving their peoples’ situation. The immediate reaction of the imperialists has been to accuse them of being terrorists, of forming part of the “axis of evil,” and so on. This has been accompanied by different types and methods of aggression employed with the intention of blocking plans that would benefit the popular sectors. Logically, this leads to confrontation, and does not exclude the possibility that under specific conditions, after exhausting the democratic road, it will be necessary to resort to violence and return to the fundamental principles of guerrilla warfare as the only alternative to build a better world.

With the reading or rereading of Guerrilla Warfare you can reach your own conclusions, returning to José Martí’s principle of struggling to achieve as much social justice as possible, a principle for which Che fought throughout his revolutionary career.

Harry “Pombo” Villegas

GUERRILLA WARFARE

Authoritative, Revised New Edition

Ernesto Che Guevara, with a foreword by Harry “Pombo” Villegas

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Che Guevara’s classic text on revolutionary tactics and strategy.

In this book, Che Guevara outlines the lessons he learned as a guerrilla soldier in the Cuban revolution and explains how a small group of dedicated fighters grew in strength with the support of the Cuban people, overcoming the odds to vanquish the US-backed dictator’s army and overthrow the dictatorship.

Since Guerrilla Warfare was first published in 1961, it has joined the canon of classic military literature, consulted by revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries alike. The text is both an insightful account of one of the decisive revolutionary movements of the twentieth century and a timeless resource for freedom fighters the world over. This edition includes Che’s corrections and his suggestions for further revisions to the text—revisions his murder in 1967 prevented him from making.

Explore the Work of Che Guevara

EXPLORE THE WORK OF CHE GUEVARA

ERNESTO GUEVARA DE LA SERNA was born in Rosario, Argentina, on June 14, 1928. While studying for a medical degree in Buenos Aires, he took a trip with his friend Alberto Granado on an old Norton motorcycle through all of Latin America, the basis for The Motorcycle Diaries. During his travels he witnessed the Bolivian revolution in 1953; and, in Guatemala in 1954, the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz by US-backed forces. Forced to leave Guatemala, he went to Mexico City, where he linked up with exiled Cuban revolutionaries and met Fidel Castro in 1955. Che joined their expedition to Cuba, where the revolutionary war began in the Sierra Maestra mountains. At first Che was the troop doctor, and later became Rebel Army commander in July 1957. Following the rebels’ victory on January 1, 1959, he was a key leader of the new revolutionary government and also of the political organization that in 1965 became the Communist Party of Cuba.

In this selection, taken from the very start of the book, one of the book’s protagonists, Giselle, a professor at a local university, notices that a man is following her on her commute home from work.

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ROAD SOAKED WITH RAIN

I rushed to a different metro car, but the man following me saw where I was going. He was right behind me. He lowered himself into the seat opposite, staring at me fixedly. I tried to avoid his gaze, not to encourage him with eye contact. I know that at times like this, the worst thing is to look directly at someone: The returned gaze will only egg him on. The one following will find evidence to support their delusions, a mirror of their own disturbed feelings. I was used to seeing strange characters roaming around the city. Loud and foulmouthed, looking for trouble. You had to avoid their gaze. I’d already been recognized a few times. The university where I work uses instructors’ photographs to recruit new students: This was annoying to some of its employees. I knew all too well about the troubled kids in the closed districts. There was nothing I could do about that. But this boy wasn’t from one of the segregation zones, of that I was sure.

I didn’t look up but only kept staring off to the side, into the air, toward the end of the metro car. Even so, I noticed a few details of his physical appearance: for example, his nails, bitten right down to the ends. His hands weren’t ugly, but the tortured nails, chewed until bloody, looked alarming. The crack-brained gaze of his large brown eyes was frightening, the dark rings under his eyes. The matted hair falling onto his forehead. It crossed my mind that perhaps he really was insane, perhaps I should press the alarm to summon a security guard, or at least jump up and run to the other end of the car where there were a few more people. Sitting near me there was only a middle-aged woman, I noticed as I looked around, with a pink handbag too bright for her age, and an adolescent boy with earplugs, lost in his own world.

I sensed from the guy’s alert body posture that there was no point in my changing seats—he would be right behind me, making this impossible chase even more unambiguous and terrifying. If he got closer, I’d panic, I’d tear into him, demanding an explanation. Absurd. Instead, I stared at the hanging straps, the ads on the metro car walls. As of late, the trains no longer stopped in the more dangerous districts where the poor lived. The metro entrances, in those areas, had all been closed. The main TV station broadcast disquieting images every single night of the homeless as they pried open the bars or tore them out using ropes. Some people even managed to drag away the steel frames with cars, forcing their way into the metro stations, howling bestially. When the cold weather came last year, the police—who ended up retreating—couldn’t clear the thronging crowds from the stations as they lit fires in oil drums and put down their pieces of cardboard on the chipped marble slabs. At the former Palace of Culture stop, they pelted the passing trains. The station had to be cleared out with tear gas, counterterrorism units. Many unfortunate and drugged outcasts wandered around the city, talking and shouting to themselves, but the boy sitting across from me didn’t look like he was using, and no matter how convenient an explanation it would be, he didn’t seem crazy. So what did he want?

He’d been following me around for days already, turning up here and there in my neighborhood. It only became clear that this was no mere coincidence, but that he really was stalking me, or at the very least following me, when I got onto the metro that day.

I’d seen him for the first time a few weeks ago, as still as a statue in front of the university. Thrice weekly I teach in this hideous cement colossus. Built two years ago, it’s called the New University. Four glass elevators travel up and down the facade, completely obscuring the streets behind it. He was standing in front of the entrance, an enormous automatic door surrounded by columns. Just another student, I thought. I was still thinking that when I hurried by him for the second or third time, his gaze fixed greedily on my face. Exam time was approaching, and I thought he was a student who hadn’t shown up to class, finally realizing the extent of his absences. He wanted some test sheets, or who knew—exoneration, advice, a favor.

As I was leaving the building’s echoing entrance hall and glimpsed him standing by the automatic door, I got a bad feeling. Then he disappeared for a few days, and I relaxed. I went back to my usual daily routes, almost forgetting about him. Maybe two weeks went by; then he appeared again by the metro exit. I recognized him immediately. He was in front of the newsprint kiosk, where my husband usually bought his newspapers.

Only two newspapers were on sale now, but all the same, during the week my husband bought them, leaving them on his writing desk, placing the extra coins in a small dish of green glass as he’d always done. Even on Saturday mornings, he still came out here and paid for the newspapers: He read out the headlines to me in inchoate rage, then crammed the papers into the garbage can. I asked him at least not to crumple them up because I could use them when cleaning vegetables. Or not to buy them. But he was incapable of renouncing his rituals. So much had changed in our lives, and it was these rituals that kept him from falling apart. His habits, routes, movements were a handhold; without them, he might lose his sense of orientation completely. We had lived in this neighborhood for decades, and although so many things had recently closed or been torn down, whenever I stepped out from the metro underpass, I still had a feeling of coming home.

But now, here was this boy. Exactly here, on this small square. To reassure myself, I kept repeating like a mantra that maybe he too lived here and was headed home. That explained why he recognized me. I had many colleagues in this neighborhood, I tried to convince myself. Why couldn’t he be living here somewhere close by as well?

Of late, it had grown increasingly difficult for me to register the faces of my students. I teach them for only one year and hardly have any personal interactions with them. I especially tend to mix up the trendy ones, they all look so much alike. With their cropped hair, tight-fitting pants, sometimes with the same eyeglasses as well. The girls are even more uniform, their haircuts and clothes identical.

But this guy was somehow different. I was struck by that from the very beginning. His hair was dark, somewhat unkempt, his skin was dark too—tanned. His gaze was penetrating, almost exalted.

Right after I stepped out of the metro car, he did as well. He was hurrying after me. I knew now for certain that I was being followed, and as I quickened my steps, my hastened tempo must have looked like an attempt at escape. At the bottom of the metro staircase, I came to a stop, abruptly changed direction, and got in line in front of a pizza stand. I stealthily glanced to the side to check if he had gone on. I didn’t even want to look at him, and yet an invisible, wide-open eye in the back of my neck told me that yes, he was still there. I would have liked to turn around and ask him directly what the hell he wanted, but the anxiety swelling in my chest proved stronger than my curiosity. I knew why: The deep, tormented wrinkle cutting across the boy’s forehead did not bode well. A few tiny signs, his fragmented movements, or the strange impeded facial tics surely betrayed latent madness. And that oblique, agonized crease sent a message to me that this guy did not have things under control mentally, and that I could be in real danger.

I ordered a pizza slice with arugula. I fumbled to find the small change in my wallet as the girl with a tongue piercing behind the counter looked impatiently at the people waiting behind me. The pizza was cold and tasteless, almost inedible. I chewed, feigning indifference, staring at the passersby, sometimes sneaking a look to the side to see if the boy was still there. We both knew that I saw him, and in my nervousness, I began to panic. Dropping the paper napkin, I clumsily bent down for it.

The sound of a thunderclap mixed with the echoing roar of the departing and arriving trains.

People walking down the steps into the metro shook out their sodden umbrellas; those without umbrellas wiped the rainwater from their foreheads with the sides of their hands. There must have been a downpour. The entire afternoon the air had been thick, as if portending a storm, but as I began my commute home no cloudburst seemed imminent, as if it were going to bypass the city.

I finished the pizza, folding the thick, inedible crusts into the paper plate and tossing them into a bin. I had to hurry: my pursuer might make up his mind to approach me. He was still there, I sensed it, I even glimpsed his back. This storm had come right in time for him, for he was standing outside, at the top of the stairs, beneath the metro entrance’s concrete eaves, squeezed in among other passengers, as if he too were only waiting for the rain to stop. I realized I could turn around, get back on the metro, and easily shake him off. And immediately, I was enraged with myself. What an absurd situation, I thought. I’ve been on my feet since early morning with two thick folders of tests in my bag to be marked up, my shoulders aching with tiredness, and now my own idiotic anxieties were stopping me from getting home. Well, no. I walked around the people waiting beneath the eaves and stepped into the downpour.

The rain was falling obliquely in torrents, the stallholders on the crowded square were hurriedly pulling tarpaulins over their stands. I picked up my pace, but within seconds my clothes were soaked through, my skirt clinging to my hips, my shoes filled with water, the rain dripping down my forehead. Blinking, I waited for the light to turn green. The cars had all turned on their headlights; behind the windshield wipers of one, I saw a man’s blurred face. Leaning forward, I ran, heard the thunder—I was trying to get to the medical clinic on the other side of the street where I could take shelter on the steps. My bag was also soaking; my laptop was in there, and I was worried about everything getting wet.

As I dashed across the sidewalk, I felt someone approaching, then felt someone grab my arm, as if they wanted to keep me there, in the middle of the street, bubbles welling up on the road from the pounding rain.

I knew immediately that it was him—the guy from the metro. He stood there on the crosswalk before me in the pouring rain, in his shirt, yelling at me to stop. The light changed, the cars began moving, somebody honked at us.

My strength gave out, I turned around to face him; trying to outshout the rumbling of the rain, I asked him what he wanted. He looked at me with this penetrating gaze, both of us drenched through and through, and answered:

I have to speak to you. You are my mother.

EYE OF THE MONKEY

By Krisztina Tóth, translated by Ottilie Mulzet

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A doctor-patient love affair goes awry in this near-future dystopian novel, the first by the award winning Hungarian writer to be translated into English.

Eye of the Monkey begins in the wake of a devastating civil war that led to the formation of the United Regency, an autocracy in an unnamed European country. The ravages of war are sweeping, and the populace has been divided into segregated zones, where the well-off are under mass surveillance and the poor are phantom presences, confined and ghettoized.

On the verge of a nervous breakdown after being followed by a young man for weeks, Giselle, a history professor at the New University, seeks the help of Dr. Mihály Kreutzer, a psychiatrist who is navigating divorce and the recent death of his mother. They soon begin a torrid love affair, but everything is not what it seems. As Giselle begins to unpack her family history and the possible root of her psychological crisis, Dr. Kreutzer, who has ties to some of the most powerful people in the country, possesses ulterior motives of his own.

In Tóth’s deftly woven, polyphonic, and dystopian novel—full of twists, turns, and treachery—we plumb the depths of a fractured, disturbed, and isolated society, as well as the underbelly of social perversions such a society produces. In this intricate web, stories within stories reveal the complicated lives of women and men who struggle to negotiate the networks of power and poverty that have shaped their lives and their relationships to one another.

PRAISE FOR EYE OF THE MONKEY

“Krisztina Tóth is irredeemably a poet. This is revealed by every element of her latest novel. It lies in the nature of her attention, and as this attention seizes upon the world, she then, at one certain point in the world she wishes to portray, zeros in, heads down to the depths and — as if she could do nothing else — opens up this minor, seemingly insignificant detail, which then becomes an impetus for the entire work, illuminating it, as in Eye of the Monkey, tying together what she left behind with what she stands before. Krisztina Tóth is a magnificent artist; receive her as such.” —László Krasznahorkai, winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature

“Remarkably, Tóth manages to hold our focus as the story forks in controlled, if mysterious, ways. A book that can be snaking and labyrinthine without sprawling aimlessly is — like an author who can handle elusiveness without opacity or coyness — quite a rare thing. … It’s our fortune that Ottilie Mulzet, a prolific translator of Hungarian, was up to the task of capturing both the strangeness and the poetry of the text.” —Rebecca Makkai, New York Times Book Review

“Reading The Eye of the Monkey is like peering into the abyss and finding your consciousness forever altered. You cannot escape this book, you already hear its thunder!” —Elfriede Jelinek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature

“A terrifying novel that reminds us how autocracy’s brutality and stupidity destroy all that is good in life. Eye of the Monkey is unsparing, unforgettable. I read it with my heart in my throat.” —Merve Emre, contributing writer at The New Yorker

“Tóth’s prose, like the surveillance state it describes, misses nothing . . . There is, as you have probably gleaned, little to be optimistic about in the book’s dystopian cosmos. But there is great enjoyment to be found in Tóth’s artistry; in the precision of her images (“she got dressed as if she were leaving a gynecological appointment”), in the originality of her characterisation (Giselle’s husband is “the kind of fellow who always knew what the temperature would be that day”). Her characters are flawed, deceitful, contradictory, and yet their undeniable humanity pulls us in. Tóth shows us how private pain is so often behind hurtful acts; Larkin’s refrain “Man hands on misery to man” feels like a silent companion to the book. . . What we are left with is not only a powerful impression of the alienating effects of authoritarianism, but a cautionary tale about self-deception.” —Matthew Janney, Financial Times

“The reader holds in their hands a superb novel—a subjective, even a personal account—of our daily lives in an autocratic society; our daily tensions and despairs. At the same time, in Tóth’s novel, we encounter people who—at times with heroic effort—attempt to live a human life. What makes this book exciting is how we are rooting for them—and for ourselves—for this to work out.” —Béla Tarr, director of Palme d’Or-nominated film The Man from London (A londoni férfi)

“Tóth’s alluring English-language debut chronicles the affair between a patient and her psychiatrist in a dystopian near-future Europe. Citizens of the unnamed country are under constant surveillance by webcams and segregated by economic status. After Gizella, a married professor, is accosted by a young man claiming to be her son, she enters therapy with Dr. Mihály Kreutzer, to whom she insists she’s never been pregnant. As Gizella recounts her parents’ divorce and sister’s suicide, Dr. Kreutzer relives the events that led to his own pending divorce and grapples with his grief over his mother’s recent death. Despite being somewhat unstable, Kreutzer holds a unique position within the autocratic government, harbors secrets unknown to the general populace, and supplies the nation’s leader with medication. Kreutzer and Gizella begin a sexual relationship, until she discovers one of his notebooks that hold records of his sexual conquests. The plot thickens when Kreutzer learns of a radioactive leak that has been contaminating the city, and the cleanup effort involves Gizella’s family. The eerie story is buoyed by keen character work, as Tóth delves into the secrets people manage to keep even in a totalitarian state. Fans of tantalizing suspense and layered storytelling such as Ryeo-ryeong’s The Trunk will find much to enjoy.” —Publishers Weekly

“Krisztina Tóth slowly unfolds an affair between a psychiatrist and his patient in Eye of the Monkey, but it’s the societal backdrop to that affair that ultimately commands the reader’s attention. Glimpsed fleetingly in brief details as characters transit from one place to another, the world of the Hungarian writer’s latest novel gradually reveals itself as one at the tail-end of horrific, unspecified national tragedy. … Despite the novel’s intentional vagaries and gaps, the writing and translation are gorgeous and specific; a lightning strike is described as “...stringing this curled up human pearl onto its incandescent thread.” Even though the novel is written in close third and the characters are unable to speak openly with each other (or even introspectively) due to their fear of surveillance, the richness of the prose opens up a rich and engaging vision into their lives.” —Eva Dunsky, Asymptote Journal