Books published by Seven Stories Press UK

Emma-Jade and Louis are born into the havoc of the Vietnam War. Orphaned, saved and cared for by adults coping with the chaos of Saigon in free-fall, they become children of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through the linked destinies of characters connected by birth and destiny, the novel zigzags between the rubber plantations of Indochina; daily life in Saigon during the war as people find ways to survive and help each other; Operation Babylift, which evacuated thousands of biracial orphans from Saigon in April 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War; and today''s global nail polish and nail salon industry, largely driven by former Vietnamese refugees - and everything in between.

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.

Set in the Five Points neighbourhood of New York City in the years 1857-1863, when America''s attitudes towards people of colour and slavery shifted - painfully, transformationally - to the point where a war that began to restore the union becomes one that owes much to black fighting regiments, and common cause grows for the abolition of slavery. We experience the daily life of Five Points through the eyes of Theo, aged 7 at the start of the book and 13 at its close. Theo is half Black and half Irish, an orphan living between the homes of her Black and Irish grandparents. Through her eyes we see everything from P.T. Barnum''s circus to the Draft Riots that tore NYC asunder, and the daily maelstrom of work and camaraderie and hardship necessary just to survive in Five Points.

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.

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.