Books published by Seven Stories Press,U.S.

Elliot Hersch is given a basketball on his tenth birthday and cuts a deal with his disapproving father: if he makes straight As, he is allowed to play. Modeling his game on the basketball heroes of his time--Clyde Frazier, Oscar Robertson, Magic Johnson, and especially Larry Bird--Elliot becomes one of the finest high school basketball players in New York. Trying to steer clear of the corruption and sleaze in the big college programs, Elliott signs with the seemingly clean-cut University of Southern Arizona (USA), partly to fulfill his promise to his father, whose one piece of advice about life is: Tell the truth, always. A quote from Chaucer, his father's favorite writer, guides both father and son "Trouthe is the hyest thing that man may kepe." What he finds at the USA and then the NBA is a far cry from untarnished "trouthe." Elliott is challenged at every turn, tangling at the end of the day with what is most true: the game. Can Elliott truly play basketball? And if not, what is left of his life? Trouthe, Lies, and Basketball is an epic comic tale--structured somewhat like a gripping basketball game, completely with literary "time-outs"--of a basketball player coming to terms with the world as it is, his talents as they are. Rosen's characters, even the mostly unseemly, are all heart, and by the end they leave those hearts on the hardwood.

Footloose and broke, the unnamed narrator of Gone Tomorrow hops on a plane without asking questions when his director friend offers him a role in an art film set in Colombia. But from the moment he arrives at the airport in Bogotá, only to witness a policeman beat a beggar half to death, it becomes clear that this will not be the story of gritty bohemians triumphing against the odds. The director, Paul Grosvenor, seems more interested in manipulating his cast than in shooting film. The cult star, Irma Irma, is a vamp too bored and boring to draw blood. And the beautiful, nymph-like Michael Simard doesn’t seem to be putting out. Meanwhile, the film’s shady financier is sleeping with his mother, while a serial killer skulks about the area killing tourists. Everything comes to a head when the carnaval celebration begins in nearby Cali. But once the fiesta is over, all that’s left are ghostly memories and the narrator’s insistence on telling the tale. “Unlike the majority of pointedly AIDS-era novels,” writes Dennis Cooper, “Gone Tomorrow is neither an amoral nostalgia fest nor a thinly veiled wake-up call hyping the religion of sobriety. It’s a philosophical work devised by a writer who’s both too intelligent to buy into the notion that a successful future requires the compromise of collective decision and too moral to accept bitterness as the consequence of an adventurous life.”

A delightful collection of classic recipes, folk history, and original drawings by Cape Cod''s most-admired chef. With a new Introduction by Anthony Bourdain"It''s a true classic, one of the most influential of my life." --Anthony Bourdain, from the new introduction"Provincetown ... is the seafood capital of the universe, the fishiest town in the world. Cities like Gloucester, Boston, New Bedford, and San Diego may have bigger fleets, but they just feed the canneries. Provincetown supplies fresh fish for the tables of gourmets everywhere." --Howard MitchamProvincetown''s best-known and most-admired chef combines delectable recipes and delightful folklore to serve up a classic in seafood cookbooks.     Read about the famous (and infamous!) Provincetown fishing fleet, the adventures of the fish and shellfish that roam Cape Cod waters, and the people of Provincetown--like John J. Glaspie, Lord Protector of the Quahaugs.     Then treat yourself to Cape Cod Gumbo, Provincetown Paella, Portuguese Clam Chowder, Lobster Fra Diavolo, Zarzuela, and dozens of other Portuguese, Creole, and Cape Cod favorites. A list of fresh and frozen seafood substitutes for use anywhere in the country is a unique feature of this lively book.     You''ll learn the right way to eat broiled crab and the safe way to open oysters. You''ll even learn how to cook a sea serpent!

The latest volume in Russ Kick''s New York Times best-selling series retells classic crime fiction in full-color visual comix splendor.     "Easily the most ambitious and successfully realized literary project in recent memory." --NPR "A treasure trove for literary comics fans." --WIREDHere are Teddy Goldenberg''s dense, murky treatment of Dashiell Hammett''s "The Road Home," often considered the first hardboiled detective story ever published. Shawn Cheng renders the first serial-killer story, the so-called fairy tale "Bluebeard" by Charles Perrault. Landis Blair reimagines The Trial as a choose-your-own-adventure story that you cannot win, and Ted Rall retells an O. Henry story about a petty criminal who just can''t get arrested. Plus 28 other contributors using a wide range of illustrative styles.     As with previous volumes in the Graphic Canon series, the illustrations run the full gamut of media and techniques, and artistic interpretations range from verbatim literalism to metaphorical extensions to surrealism and abstraction. The common theme, tracing the origins and standout texts of the morbid and mysterious, unites these multifarious partners in crime.

In late October 1939, Robert Graves wrote to Alan Hodge: "I have begun a new book, about English." Graves and Hodge had recently completed a social history of the between-wars period called The Long Week-End. Now they embarked on this new project, "a handbook for writers of English Prose," to be called The Reader Over Your Shoulder. The world was in total upheaval. Graves had already fled Majorca three years earlier at the start of the Spanish Civil War. As they labored over their new writing project, Graves and Hodge witnessed the fall of France and the evacuation of Allied forces at Dunkirk. In early September 1940 began the bombing of London by the German Luftwaffe, a concentrated effort to destroy the resolve of the English people. Graves's and Hodge's idea was simple enough: at a time when their whole world was falling apart, the survival of English prose sentences, of writing that was clear, concise, intelligible, had become paramount if hope were going to survive the onslaught. They came up with forty-one principles for writing, the majority devoted to clarity, the remainder to grace of expression. They studied the prose of a wide range of noted authors and leaders, finding much room for improvement. Quoting grammarian and bestselling author Patricia T. O'Conner from her new introduction, "With a new war to be won, the kingdom couldn't afford careless, sloppy English. Good communication was critical." The book they would write would turn out to be one of the most erudite, and at the same time one of the most spontaneous and inspired, ever to take on the challenge of writing well. O'Conner in her introduction describes The Reader Over Your Shoulder as nothing less than "the best book on writing ever published." The present edition restores, for the first time in three-quarters of a century, the original, 1943, text, which in subsequent printings and editions had been shortened by over 150 pages, including much of the heart of the book.

Counting on Community is Innosanto Nagara's follow-up to his hit ABC book, A is for Activist. Counting up from one stuffed piñata to ten hefty hens--and always counting on each other--children are encouraged to recognize the value of their community, the joys inherent in healthy eco-friendly activities, and the agency they posses to make change. A broad and inspiring vision of diversity is told through stories in words and pictures. And of course, there is a duck to find on every page!

2013 Philip K. Dick Award Special Citation of Excellence"Orwell, Vonnegut, and Douglas Adams are felt on every page, though Magnason is never derivative. His satire and insightful social commentary sweeten the pot and the sheer wackiness of Magnason's oversized imagination is invigorating."-Publishers Weekly, starred reviewLoveStar, the enigmatic and obsessively driven founder of the LoveStar corporation, has unlocked the key to transmitting data via birdwaves, thus freeing mankind from wires and devices, and allowing consumerism, technology, and science to run rampant over all aspects of daily life. Cordless modern men and women are paid to howl advertisements at unsuspecting passers-by, REGRET machines eliminate doubt over roads not taken, soul mates are identified and brought together (while existing, unscientifically validated relationships are driven remorselessly asunder), and rocketing the dead into the sky becomes both a status symbol and a beautiful, cathartic show for those left behind. Indridi and Sigrid, two blissfully happy young lovers, have their perfect worlds threatened (along with Indridi's sanity) when they are "calculated apart" and are forced to go to extreme lengths to prove their love. Their journey ultimately puts them on a collision course with LoveStar, who is on his own mission to find what might become the last idea in the world. Steeped in influences ranging from Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Kurt Vonnegut to George Orwell, Douglas Adams, and Monty Python, Andri Snær Magnason has created a surreal yet uncomfortably familiar world, where the honey embrace of love does its utmost to survive amid relentless and overpowering controls.

A brilliant dissection and reconstruction of the three major faith-based systems of belief in the world today, from one of the world's most articulate intellectuals, Slavoj Zizek, in conversation with Croatian philosopher Boris Gunjevic. In six chapters that describe Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in fresh ways using the tools of Hegelian and Lacanian analysis, God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse shows how each faith understands humanity and divinity--and how the differences between the faiths may be far stranger than they may at first seem. Chapters include (by Zizek) (1) "Christianity Against Sacred," (2) "Glance into the Archives of Islam," (3) "Only Suffering God Can Save Us," (4) "Animal Gaze," (5) "For the Theologico-Political Suspension of the Ethical," (by Gunjevic) (1) "Mistagogy of Revolution," (2) "Virtues of Empire," (3) "Every Book Is Like Fortress," (4) "Radical Orthodoxy," (5) "Prayer and Wake."

A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Title of 2011In Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?, readers follow a man who wishes not to be followed, a man who, after a series of personal and professional disasters, finds himself lying on a rain-soaked road in the desolate, treeless Faroe Islands, population only a few thousand, a wad of bills in his pocket and no memory of how he had come to be there. From there, Brage Award-winning author and playwright Johan Harstad's debut novel--previously published to great success in eleven countries with its first English-language appearance in June 2011--tells the story of Mattias, a thirty-something gardener living in Stavanger, Norway, whose idol is Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon: the man who was willing to stand in Neil Armstrong's shadow in order to work, diligently and humbly, for the success of the Apollo 11 mission. Through Harstad's "delectably light but nonetheless impactful prose . . . [t]he novel's finest moments wrap you up in communion with Mattias, as if you are spending a quiet afternoon with an old friend, chatting but mostly thinking" (Three Percent). Surrounded by a vivid and memorable cast of characters--aspiring pop musicians, Caribbean-obsessed psychologists, death-haunted photographers, girls who dream of anonymous men falling in love with them on bus trips, and even Buzz Aldrin himself--"Harstad combines formal play and linguistic ferocity with a searing emotional directness" (Dedi Felman, Words Without Borders) to bring Mattias to the realization that he cannot always blend into the background.