Books published by Seven Stories Press UK

No one knows more than strippers about being looked at. 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.

Emilia Codrescu had been responsible for the burning and shredding of Romanian censors'' notebooks, viewed as State secrets, but prior to fleeing the country in 1974 she had stolen one. Now, forty years later, she makes the notebook available to ''Liliana Corobca'' for the newly instituted Museum of Communism The Censor''s Notebook is a window into the intimate workings of censorship under communism, steeped in mystery and secrets and lies, confirming the power of literature to capture personal and political truths.

Whether he''s describing Tracy Emin or Warhol, the films of Barbet Schroeder (''Schroeder is well aware that life is not a narrative; that we impose form on the movements of chance, contingency, and impulse....'') or the installations of Barbara Kruger (''Kruger compresses the telling exchanges of lived experience that betray how skewed our lives are...''), Indiana is never just describing. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it''s also political, plus it''s a riot of fun on the page.

THE NIGHT is a political novel about the financial crisis and socio-political division in Venezuela from 2008 to 2010. The title of the book, originally also in English, is a gesture towards the failure of Chavism - the legacy of the Socialist and often controversial former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez - to resist US influence. Yet, the form is unapologetically literary, a reflection on the depiction and distortion of reality through storytelling. Recurring blackouts envelop Caracas in an inescapable darkness that makes nightmares come true. Real and fictional characters, most of whom are writers, play the role of narrator in this polyphonic novel. They recount contradictory versions of the plot, a series of femicides that began at the same time as the energy crisis. The central narrator is a psychiatrist who manipulates the accounts of his friend, an author writing a book titled The Night; and his patient, an advertising executive obsessed with understanding the world through word puzzles. The author shifts between crime fiction and metafiction, cautioning readers that the events retold are both true and manipulated.

A very short novel with the power and resonance of a much longer one, Anne-Marie la Beaute is a profound and moving act of remembrance, a clear-eyed assessment of the hard-edged nature of fame, a meditation on aging - and a wonderfully observant and comic exploration of human foibles. In short, another thought-provoking master class in how we perform life by the peerless Yasmina Reza.

The Croatian city of Vukovar was the site of some of the worst violence in ex-Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Nora is a journalist assigned to do a puff piece on the perpetrator of a crime of passion - a Croatian high school teacher who fell in love with one of her students, a Serb, and is now in prison for having murdered her husband. But Nora herself is the daughter of a man who was murdered years earlier under mysterious circumstances. And she wants, if not to avenge her father, at least to bring to justice whoever committed the crime. An exciting literary thriller from one of Europe''s most celebrated young authors.

The second novel by the highly praised post-war Croatian writer Robert Perisic.

Ida is a married woman in her late thirties, who lives in Milan and works at a radio station. Her mother wants to renovate the family apartment in Messina, to put it up for sale and asks her daughter to sort through her things - to decide what to keep and what to throw away. Surrounded by the objects of her past, Ida is forced to deal with the trauma she experienced as a girl, twenty-three years earlier, when her father left one morning, never to return.