Seven Stories Press,U.S.

At the age of sixteen, Mary Powell marries poet John Milton. Their marriage, which plays out during the Civil War, is not one of love, but rather a practical arrangement that proves to be a devastating mismatch of temperaments and convictions. Her Royalist sympathies and his ardent parliamentarianism, her independence, and his austere way of life, 1640s England is a hotbed of clashing ideologies and so too is this marriage. The story, which unfolds in Marie''s sensitive and searching journals, is a scathing portrait of one of England''s most famous poets, a story of literary ambition and masculine egoism, and, like all of Graves'' historical novels, a monumental achievement of closely watched history. One the one hand, this is a tender story of the romance Marie Powell found outside the walls of her tyrannical husband''s house. On the other it is also a brilliant account of one of the most breathtaking epochs in English history, when that kingdom was ravaged by a bloody civil war and the tides of fortune swayed from one to the other side of the opposing camps - the King against his parliament, tyranny against freedom - culminating in the dramatic execution of Charles I.

A young child journeys toward independence in this  award-winning picture book, "visual narrative of the highest level."* With richly evocative art by a two-time winner of NY Times’ Best Illustrated Books, here is a story of separation and return.After a young boy unties the knot anchoring his small boat near his mother, he slips away from her on a gentle tide, floating off on a quiet and peaceful journey through town, jungle, and city. When he floats back to the beach—was it a few hours? a few minutes?—his mother is there at the water''s edge right where he left her. Perhaps it was a dream? And yet he has returned from his solo adventure with a gift pressed into his palm, a tiny seed that when planted will grow on its own.Separation from a parent, whether for a long period or just a few minutes, can fill a child with anxiety, but at other times that same child may long to do things on their own. Using gouache, collage and watercolor, Lundberg''s stunning illustrations in Nobody But Me convey both the child’s agency and the unbreakable bond with his mother. Here is a story that will bring joy to young and old readers alike. 4-7 years."The author invite us to witness the magic of a perfect childhood [story].”***August Prize jury**Special Mention Bologna Ragazzi Awards 2025, Fiction

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.

Cat Fitzpatrick delights in this post-pandemic follow-up to her debut verse novel of present-day manners, The Call-Out—a trans community celebration of mores, gender theory, and rhyme.The Dinner Party returns to the chaotic and adorable world of trans femme. The title piece begins… “The ‘Rona being now at last abated,” and continues with cameo portraits of the seven guests she plans to invite, including:Together, as we had in days gone by.I asked Rakshasi, clad in black, so thin,So eager for some trouble to get in,Of any kind, and Sophie, blunt and dry,Who often ended up the night so pissedShe’d trip and fall when climbing up the stairs,And learned Bridget, sweet, beset by cares,            Who always talks about her therapist ––My besties. Plus I asked along a pairOf mascs: Adonis, such a charming youth,More interested in beauty than in truthWho drives a motorbike and braids his hair,And Dominic, less young, but full of poise,A trickster with a most provoking grin,More pleased with contradiction than with sin,And even more with argument than boys,Joining  “The Dinner Party” are several other themed pieces, including “A Stay in the Country,” a short arcadian pageant, “Baby Book,” about the trials and tribulations of making babies as queer and transsexual couples, “Letter to Crabstick,” an epistolatory friendship, and “Uxorious Sonnets,” a collection of eight love poems, among them Sonnet 6 in which she writes:it’s almost terrifying when we fuckhow there I am, how in that jostle and shoveof flesh, my thoughts, that mostly run amuck,contract to simply shouting Love You Love.

An eloquent and passionate call for educational transformation.In the culminating work of his career, groundbreaking educator Jonathan Kozol goes back into urban schools, where racial isolation is at the highest level since he became a teacher and is now compounded by a new regime of punitive instruction and coercive uniformity that is deemed to be appropriate for children who are said to be incapable of learning in more democratic ways, like children in more privileged communities. Kozol believes it’s well past time to batter down the walls between two separate worlds of education and to make good, at long last, on the “promissory note” that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963.We Shall Not Bow Down takes aim directly at the disparate agenda that denies Black and Latino children the right to ask discerning questions about a system that places them in toxic sequestration and substitutes draconian penalties and a constant fear of failure for anything resembling healthy motivation. This extreme degree of indoctrinational and authoritarian instruction, Kozol writes, has robbed too many of our children of the power to think independently at a time when it is desperately needed in the face of an administration that is threatening the very essences of democracy.We Shall Not Bow Down is a significantly revised and expanded version of Kozol''s book, An End to Inequality, which the New York Times called “An unapologetic cri de coeur about the shortcomings of the schools that serve poor Black and Hispanic children, and thus, the moral failure of the nation to end the inequality [Kozol] has documented for decades.”At this moment of political retrenchment, with Trump and Musk riding high, it may seem an impossible dream, but Kozol argues convincingly that it’s a goal worth fighting for.

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.

Unique, inimitable expressions of romantic love from the National Book Award-winning poet, the great Irish American bard.The love poems of the Great American poet Alan Dugan rival those by Catullus and Neruda for their insight and wit that have offered solace and entertained readers for decades and beyond.Caustic, lustful and dark, these are yet beautiful expressions of the lionhearted Irish American poet, the core of his art, blending hurt and hardship with a powerful belief in the driving force that love is.From “Love Song: I and Thou,” in Poems (1961):                  I can nail my left palm                                    To the left-hand crosspiece but                  I can’t do everything myself:                                    I need a hand to nail the right,                  A help, a love, a you, a wife.And from “Night Scene before Combat” in Poems Six (1989):                                    … I should get back                  to the truck I I left idling                  by the curb, but I turn to you                  for one last time in sleep, love,                  before I put my uniform back on,                  check my piece, and say So Long.

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.

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.

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.