Seven Stories Press,U.S.

A concise, readable and thoroughly revised overview of Cuba written by Cubans for anyone interested in quickly understanding the island country''s turbulent history. Cuba: A Brief History covers the pre-Hispanic period, through Cuba''s struggle to maintain the revolution in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the period after Fidel Castro''s decision to step down from office, to the 2014 opening to Cuba by the Obama Administration, the retirement of Raul Castro and his replacement as president in 2018 by Miguel Diaz Canal, and finally to the reversal of Washington''s engagement with Cuba under President Trump.

In 1976, Su Friedrich, the experimental filmmaker and visual artist known for exploring themes of identity, gender, and personal narrative through avant-garde cinema, embarked on a transformative six-month solo trip through nine countries in North and West Africa. Through her letters, diary entries, and images captured in black and white on her 35mm Olympus, she documented her day-to-day encounters with the people she meets from Algeria to Morocco (during the Western Sahara War), Burkina Faso to Nigeria (during a coup). Friedrich not only weaves a rich tapestry of Africa in the mid-1970s, but she also imbues each page with her thoughts, feelings, and discoveries. She travels south through the Sahara by hitching rides on trucks and recalls her surprise when she appeared in the central market of a town and was quickly invited to stay at the home of one of the curious locals. Thirty-nine years later, Friedrich has unearthed her journals, photographs and letters and has constructed a record of her discoveries on a journey that will resonate with readers who love to travel and fans with wanderlust.

From the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in New Amsterdam in 1609 to the Harlem Renaissance to the impact of #BLM, here is a concise and newly updated history of Black Americans in New York for readers aged 12 and up. Black Legacy reasserts the essential work of teacher and historian William Loren Katz, who was committed to documenting and uplifting the stories of Black Americans'' courage and creativity, resilience and rebellion: Black Legacy includes chronological stories of: Black politicians and poets, abolitionists and athletes and activists, and the first Black children to attend public schools; Sojourner Truth, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and others who fought for Black freedom; Shirley Chisholm, Madame C.J. Walker, NY''s first Black mayor David Dinkins and many other businesspeople and politicians who brought dignity through their work toward equality; and the Black history of Seneca Village and Weeksville, the Savoy and Cotton clubs of the Jazz Age, Harlem Hospital where Martin Luther King Jr. nearly died, the African burial site at Trinity Church, and so much more. Written with economy and flair, Black Legacy is a fascinating read, a necessary teaching tool, and a great addition to the literature of the Black history of New York and of America.

In a letter to his mother in 1954, a young Ernesto Guevara wrote, ''The Americas will be the theater of my adventures in a way that is much more significant than I would have believed.'' In The Awakening of Latin America we have the story of those adventures, charting Che''s evolution from an impressionable young medical student to the ''heroic guerrilla,'' assassinated in cold blood in Bolivia. Spanning seventeen years, this anthology draws on from his family''s personal archives and offers the best of Che''s writing: examples of his journalism, essays, speeches, letters, and even poems. As Che documents his early travels through Latin America, his involvement in the Guatemalan and Cuban revolutions, and his rise to international prominence under Fidel Castro, we see how his fervent commitment to social justice shaped and was shaped by the continent he called home.

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 organise 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 that we can and should emulate through solidarity and direct action. Among the triumphs McBay describes are: Indigenous groups'' successful effort to shut down a pipeline and remove colonial statues; neighbourhoods repelling gentrification and a nuclear waste dump in Australia; residents halting the construction of a parking garage in Boston''s Chinatown; American disability rights activists'' use of direct action to pave the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act; farmers preventing the construction of a nuclear reactor in rural Germany and multiple neighbourhood networks in the US preventing Wal-Mart from setting up shop in their community. Along the way, McBay provides first-hand 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.

Our twelve-year-old narrator, an aspiring writer, is at a wake. He takes in the death of his beloved grandfather, Pop, a larger-than-life figure. The overflowing crowd - a sign of a life well lived includes construction workers in their muddy boots, elderly Irish women in black dresses, cops in uniform, members of the family deep in mourning. He watches it all, not yet realising how this Irish-American world defines who he is and who he will become. His older brother Tommy has no patience for rules and domesticities, his father is emotionally elsewhere. This boy knows that he''s the best thing his mother''s got, though her sadness envelops them both. In A Kid from Marlboro Road, past and present intermingle as family stories are told and retold. The narrative careens between the previous generation''s colourful sojourns in infamous parts of New York City: the Bronx, Hell''s Kitchen and the softer world of Gibson, the town on Long Island where they now live. There are scenes in the Rockaways, at Belmont racetrack, and in Montauk. Edward Burns''s buoyant first novel is a bildungsroman. Out of one boy''s story a collective warmth emerges, a certain kind of American tale, raucous and joyous.

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.

Here is a modern book for progressive readers of all ages that includes the prescient 1931 pamphlet, ''Anarchy Explained to Children,'' by Jose Antonio Emmanuel writing under the pseudonym Max Bembo, a teacher and anarchist philanthropist who advocated for, among other things, freeing the education of children from the power of the Catholic Church. In the essay he offers to the children of working-class families a simple explanation of liberatory principles and how to put them into practice. Following the essay, each of the principles he proposes is explained very simply in a double page spread accompanied by an engraving, which conveys the beauty of the world that Emmanuel envisioned. The engravings were newly created for the 2017 Argentine edition of this book. Anarchy Explained to Children will appeal to parents and educators who are interested in sharing with a young reader the ideals of liberatory education, in which extremism and oppression are banished, and values of mutual support, equality between individuals, universal love and human solidarity are promoted. ''Help: To those who hesitate, give them encouragement: to those who despair of seeing victory far away, give them courage. Mutual help is a sacred and universal duty.''

In Alabama Village, an impoverished and often violent neighbourhood south of Mobile, the children no longer flinch at the eruption of gunshots. To them, it''s just another day. In this community, few things last - the loss of life is relentless, and relief efforts come and go. But John and Dolores Eads, a devout Christian couple who established Light of the Village church, stay. They spread their mission: lead with love, faith, and consistency - and don''t condemn or judge. In interlacing chapters, award-winning journalist J. Malcolm Garcia follows the lives of the Alabama Village community and the kids who grew up at Light of the Village church. Da''Cino Dees saw his first shooting at eight years old and now works at Light of the Village; Aaron ''Billy Boy'' Amison has been dreaming about dead people since he was little and has been in and out of jail since he was fourteen; Jesenda Brown hopes to escape poverty by starting her own cleaning business; and although Corey ''Bigg Man'' Davis has accrued exuberant wealth from unknown sources, his personality is marked by his kindhearted generosity. These striking, raw, and humanising portraits, among others, showcase the Village and its people, in all its devastation and resilient determination. Alabama Village is an ode to communities and the individual narratives that make them whole.

The sea is the universe close to us. Here is the story of a man who lives at the water''s edge watching the rise and fall of the shoreline. It is the sea itself that gives him everything he needs to survive, and yet it will take courage to enter the sometimes roaring waters. The man knows that this sea that gives him everything, can also take it away, but with the help of friends and with patience, he knows the sea can be a balm and a source of life. With bright and beautiful watercolour art by Amanda Mijangos, this simple story from the Notebooks of Nobel laureate Saramago, will excite and intrigue the youngest readers - and all of those who read along with them.

Terms of Servitude explores the paradox whereby prominent digital platforms like Meta, Google, and X that initially facilitated the expression of activism and advocacy for Palestinian liberation have come to fortify Zionist settler-colonialism. Through anti-Palestinian censorship and erasure often justified by so-called ''terms of service'' or ''community standards'' violations, these Big Tech companies provide the Israeli occupation forces with AI technology and metadata used to streamline genocidal colonial violence against Palestinians. Through original analysis and careful documentation, Omar Zahzah, Assistant Professor of Arab, Muslim, Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies at San Francisco State University, traces the timeline from the Sheikh Jarrah uprisings of 2021 to the beginning of October 2023 to the most current developments to explain social media''s role in advancing and suppressing Palestinian narratives. This revealing and alarming book explores what makes anti-colonial counter-narratives across digital platforms so urgent, and what resistance can and must mean in light of the consolidation of Big Tech with Israeli colonialism and genocide.

A bildungsroman and the most autobiographical yet of Charley Rosen''s many works of fiction, nonfiction and reportage on the subject of basketball, Dribbling a Basketball on the Road to Damascus tells the story of the life of Chazz Klein, a power forward and elite scorer who starts at Metropolitan College and ends up on the Knicks by way of the Detroit Pistons. Klein loves the game that helped him survive his childhood and find meaning. But his awkwardness early in life also stays with him, as both love and long-lasting meaning elude him except in small doses. And yet he does achieve, across the journey represented in these pages, that rarest of gifts, a kind of humility, an acceptance of himself, and the peace that goes with that. Along the way, Klein shaves points and helps us understand the appeal of doing so even though it goes against his love of the game that is pure and life-affirming. So why act against all that? Because everything good in this story is transient, including that joy in playing, and there is a sense here that nothing ever really changes. Different kinds of power converge, and a player who prizes the pure game of hoops above all else can at the same time be someone who breaks the rules and helps corrupt the competitive sport. These are some of the qualities that make Dribbling a Basketball on the Road to Damascus a wise novel as well as an adventurous one.

Fawn and Silver share nearly everything: coming out together as trans in their small Maryland town, clocking a copious number of hours in detention, and spending their sleepovers secretly making out. They''re also uniquely obsessed with vampires, who are being hunted, imprisoned, and executed for the danger they allegedly pose to human life. Meanwhile in Seattle, Rachel''s relationship to her girlfriend and her membership in her mother''s vampire-slaying vigilante group is thrown into question when she''s bitten by her mother''s nemesis and awakes with a craving for blood. When Silver disappears and Fawn goes west in search of him, her and Rachel''s fates converge, both falling into the hands of Cain, an edgelord vampire known for his proselytizing for the drinking of human blood. But in discovering hidden tunnels and secret bars, youth shelters and punk shows and safe houses, Fawn finds herself in the middle of a vampire underground in Seattle - an organised resistance keeping each other alive through a network of blood distribution and protection from slayers. Fawn''s Blood is a timely antidote to the anti-trans moral panic of today. Playing with tropes about monstrousness, predation, and villainy, this multi-voiced vampire novel offers a paranormal YA fantasy full of complicated queer characters - human and monster alike - all of whom are simply trying to survive in a world that wants them dead.

In her fifth novel, Gologorsky returns to the setting of all her books - the American working class of Long Island and the Bronx, where the last two generations of Americans have been scarred by the domestic side of foreign wars and by drugs - from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, from heroin to oxycodone - good people seeking a good life amidst obstacles that can seem insurmountable. In The Angle of Falling Light, the protagonist Tessa, has no model close to her for the kind of life she''d like to lead. Her sister Marla starts using drugs, following the lead of their uncle Hack, who softens his days with alcohol and weed. Her stepfather Scotty is a vet struggling with depression, and her mom Nina can t cope. Nina takes refuge with a new lover and Tess, too, finds safety in a new relationship if not the direction she so desperately seeks. The Angle of Falling Light is a book with a big cast of troubled innocents, everyone looking for a way forward, a lesson in how to give love while still putting yourself first, one of the most difficult of life''s challenges. As Gologorsky has it, some will lose this battle, while others will at least survive it.

Aime Cesaire was a poet and, later, a politician from the Caribbean island of Martinique, who spoke out against the sufferings and humiliations endured by the peoples of the former French colonies. In Aime Cesaire: No to Humiliation, we are with Cesaire in 1930s Paris. The young Martinican poet and his friends Leopold Sedar Senghor and Leon Gontran Damas are launching the Negritude movement. Together, they celebrate their Black African roots, protesting French colonial rule and policies of assimilation. They invite West Indians, Senegalese, Guyanese, and others to reject the suffocating French colonial presence and to take pride in their accents, their cultures and their shared histories. Aime''s great book-length poem, Notebook on the Return to the Native Land, and other works, are a global inspiration. His speeches enliven the crowds back home in Martinique, and he rises in the political arena, defending Martinican identity. As a writer, as the Mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy of the French National Congress, Aime Cesaire continues to write and to fight against colonial power and for the dignity of Black peoples everywhere.

In Together, social justice kids book pioneer Innosanto Nagara teams up with poet and activist Mona Damluji for a stunningly tender and pitch-perfect visual feast that juxtaposes individual action with the power of people acting together. Each of the ten free-verse couplets in the poem is spread across four pages of imagery, to make a unique and different kind of board book for young kids to discover with their families. The first illustrated book in which Nagara applies his extraordinary visual imagination to words not his own, Together is simplicity itself a poem about the transformational change that happens when people stop acting alone and start doing things together. Together is Nagara''s third board book, following the immensely popular social justice board books A is for Activist and Counting on Community.