Seven Stories Press,U.S. strana 2 z 2

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.

George Sand was the most popular novelist of the mid-19th century, and the pen name of Amandine Aurore Dupin. Sand wasn''t looking for scandal or subterfuge by using a pseudonym, but for freedom to live and to write, which she found by dressing as a man, writing under a man''s name, and loving who and how she chose. Her actions were an affront to the prejudices of the 19th century and a formidable lesson in courage. Young Aurore grew up torn between two women and two worlds: the conventional and narrow bourgeoisie of her paternal grandmother, who raised her in the countryside, and the modest, Parisian environment of her whimsical mother. Refusing to become the stereotype of femininity, she dreams of another world, where she can breathe, uncorseted, away from the strictures of social expectation. She ignores the slander and rumours that follow her, and builds a free woman''s life, deeply respected by friends and contemporaries like Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert and many others. Using her fame as a writer, she fights for women''s and workers'' rights. She is the model of an emancipated woman.

Out of necessity, women in El Salvador began attending births during the twelve-year-long civil war, when pregnant people in rural areas and guerrilla camps could not access medical care. From their mothers and older midwives, these women learned parteria - traditional midwifery that was once the norm in El Salvador and has since been prohibited. After the official end to the war, the parteras became central fixtures in the ''repopulation'' of their country, building new communities, often without electricity or running water or hospitals. In 1994, out of this organizing, the Association of Parteras Rosa Andrade (APRA) was born. Today, the founding members of APRA, along with a younger generation training with them, continue to fight for the reproductive rights of thousands of people living in the municipalities of Suchitoto, Cuscatlan. Three decades since the war, APRA''s work is increasingly criminalized by a government that has made homebirth illegal, synonymized miscarriage and homicide, and banned midwives from assisting in hospitals. Collected in 2019 by Salvadoran American birth worker Noemi Delgado, Guardianas weaves together testimonies from twenty members of APRA to tell a collective story of: the experiences of midwives, mothers, guerrilla fighters and ''gente de masa'' during the armed conflict that took approximately 75,000 lives; the role of the midwife during the period of repopulation after the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords, when thousands of displaced Salvadorans were finally allowed back into their homeland; the brutal obstetric violence that people giving birth in hospitals routinely face, and how this mistreatment compares to care provided by a midwife; the extreme repression Salvadoran midwives have faced since 2011, when the health ministry prohibited home births; the ancestral nature of parteria, an earth-based art practice that is passed down between generations, and derives from an extensive body of knowledge about safe and empowering births. This anthology is both a safeguarding of the caretaking traditions of parterea as well as a broader invitation to consider the role of birth work in organizing against war, imperialism, and corporate power. Here, the beauty of the testimonies - and the care with which they were compiled - ultimately come together to upend our ideas of what a medical ethnography can be and what an oral history can do.

Mr. Distinctive has a memorable, attractive face. He only has to walk down the street, and everyone turns to smile at him. Once he starred in a TV commercial and was praised and congratulated for having a face that sold the product well. Mr. Distinctive is very pleased with himself and loves to take selfies with his cellphone. He posts countless images of himself that are shared all over the internet. One day Mr. Distinctive looks in the mirror and sees that his features have begun to fade, his face has changed into a blur. With every new photo he posts, his distinctiveness dwindles. Determined to regain his flawlessly beautiful face and the adoration it brought him, Mr. Distinctive seeks out an extreme solution. But are the lengths he goes in order to restore his sense of being unique and exceptional worth it? In their new story, the creators of The Lost Soul - Nobel prize in literature winner Olga Tokarczuk and illustrator Joanna Concejo - show us a world of obsession with personal appearance and self-promotion, where happiness is an imperative, and the cult of youth rules.

In this concise volume, Ralph Nader, our trusted voice on corporate power and civic resistance, goes right to the most basic taproots of an aspiring democracy-its people and their roles in creating and sustaining community. These roles, including citizen, voter, worker, taxpayer, consumer, and parent, contribute to civic self-respect, and one''s own significance in society. As federal judge Learned Hand said in 1944 during a famous brief speech at Central Park, New York City-neither the laws, the courts or other related institutions can be saved without the underlying exercise of the democratic spirit by the people. Civic Self Respect argues the importantace to recognize the centrality in the development of a civic personality, as distinguished from a private personality with the two co-existing for a moral life participating in the common good. As Nader''s mother said when her friends would wonder how she could be raising four children and still have so much time for community engagements: ''What''s the difference?'' One depends on each other the family and the community. This book argues for how important it is for our educational system to teach the essentials of civic responsibility beyond its occupational or technical emphasis, because the emergence of such a public-minded personality is so essential for understanding the world and shaping civil societies.

Now updated and with new material Hello, Cruel World features a catalog of 121 alternatives to suicide that range from the playful (moisturize!), to the irreverent (shatter some family values), to the controversial, fun, challenging and easy. Encouraging readers to unleash their hearts'' harmless desires, the book has only one directive: ''Don''t be mean.'' It is this guiding principle that brings the reader on a self-validating journey and toward a resounding decision to embrace life. Using graphics and checklists, and with great humor and gutsiness, Kate Bornstein dares readers to re-envision the gender system as we know it. She offers stories and insights that are tenderly intimate and unapologetically edgy. Hello, Cruel World also includes: an Introduction by Sara Quin of Tegan and Sara; The Hello Cruel Scale of Feelings; an Index of Alternatives with safety and effectiveness scales. Suicide rates among lgbtq+ teens are much higher than for their cis peers; with love and humor and confession and insight, Bornstein hopes to keep every freak out there alive. She is a radical role model, an affectionate best friend, and a guiding mentor all in one. This one-of-a-kind guide to staying alive is a much-needed, sometimes unorthodox approach to life for those who want to stay on the edge, and alive.

Jose Marti organized and unified the movement for Cuban independence and died on the battlefield. His dedication to the goal of Cuban freedom made his name a synonym for liberty throughout Latin America. This collection of the writing of Jose Marti''s features bilingual poetry, his political essays and writings on culture, and his letters. Readers will discover a literary genius and an insightful political commentator on the troubled relationship between the United States and Latin America. ''Marti was the guide of his time but also stands as the anticipator of ours,'' wrote Cuban revolutionary leader Carlos Rafael Rodriguez. Marti was an outstanding teacher, journalist, poet and revolutionary of his time, able to interweave the threads of Latin American culture and history.

All people deserve to be respected and valued. Regardless of where we were born, how much we have, what we believe or think, or our age or the colour of our skin - all lives are important and we deserve to live them with satisfaction, justice, safety, and freedom. There are many different kinds of human rights and many people who have fought to establish and protect those rights. Here you can learn about rights for indigenous, workers, children, and lgbtq+ people, the right to go to school and have a home, the right to think a certain way and practice the religion of your choice - rights we may not even realise weren''t always protected. Human Rights is an oversized, graphically vibrant book with timelines, short and easy-to-understand explanations, important people who fought for changes in human rights law, and a chapter on protecting future rights. It''s an essential visual reference that explains all there is to know about our human rights and the laws and doctrines that protect them.

Sergeant Roger Lamb is in a prison camp near Boston with 3,000 other soldiers in General Johnny Burgoyne''s army who surrendered at the Battle of Saratoga. Lamb is a non-commissioned officer in the British Army who served in America during the American War of Independence. But the American Congress refuses to ratify a repatriation agreement and Lamb plans an escape. He manages to make his way through General Washington''s lines and rejoins Cornwallis in the Carolinas, fighting with him until Yorktown. Then he makes another remarkable escape to rejoin the British in New York. The second in a two-book series, this account is inspired by the real-life Sergeant Lamb''s personal memoirs. Renowned poet, classicist, and novelist Robert Graves traces the sergeant''s harrowing time in military service, providing a compelling, only barely fictionalized eyewitness account of a crucial point in American history.

Explores how fewer and larger investment companies now manage the excess financial wealth of the world''s 40 million richest people, to the detriment of everyone else and the global environment. Political sociologist Peter Phillips examines the global economy to demonstrate how networks of wealthy individuals have evolved since the COVID-19 pandemic and how the financial investments of transnational elites threaten human rights and the future of the planet. Focusing on private capital investments, military spending, and the propaganda machine, he poses three key research questions: To what extent do the wealthy influence - or even dominate - decision making that affects all of us in society? Who are the most powerful people? How does the accumulation of capital work? Titans of Capital examines changes in the global economy during the past five years that demonstrate how networks of wealthy individuals have evolved since the COVID-19 pandemic, and how the financial investments of transnational elites threaten human rights and the future of the planet. Private capital investments serve as the primary operating funds for international arms sales, private prisons, and other socially negative activities. These investments fuel the continued use of carbon-based energy leading to amplified global warming and climate change. Military spending is a critical component of continued wealth concentration and political power in the world. Spending on arms and intelligence is a required aspect of maintaining global power and control. Dealing with Russia, China, Iran and other ''rogue'' states is a continuing agenda for agents of the world power elites. Propaganda machines in Western capitalist governments serve to protect elite wealth by promoting military conflicts to open new regions for economic investment. Phillips warns that while continued concentration of global capital increases the profits enjoyed by the global economy''s ''Titans,'' it also increases global inequality, starvation, and civil unrest, threatening the lives of the hundreds of millions of people living in extreme poverty. It is imperative to ask how we can reverse the concentration of Titan wealth and revitalize grassroots democracy unbridled by extreme wealth. Identifying 117 global Titans by name and exposing the networks and interests that unite them provides readers opposed to militarism and committed to economic equality with crucial tools to directly engage the power elite who endanger life on earth.