Under a new partnership, Seven Stories will distribute titles by Ocean Press and Ocean Sur, its Spanish-language imprint, in North America and around the world, excluding Cuba.
The focus initially will be on the complete works of Che Guevara in newly redesigned editions, with authoritative text created by Ocean together with the Che Guevara Studies Center of Havana, whose director is Aleida March, Guevara's partner. Seven Stories will release the complete backlist of nine titles, at the rate of roughly one a month, starting with The Motorcycle Diaries in July, featuring a new introduction by Walter Salles, the director of the film based on the book. In September, the first new Che Guevara title will appear: I Embrace You with All My Revolutionary Fervor: Letters 1947-1967. Some 80% of the letters in this first-ever collection of Guevara's letters have never before appeared in English.
Besides the rollout in the U.S. this summer and fall, Seven Stories rights director Silvia Stramenga has negotiated partnerships for foreign rights to many of the Che Guevara titles, including with Penguin Classics in England, and many other publishers around the world, as well as deals with Audible for both English and Spanish audiobooks. She is also fielding film rights inquiries.
Seven Stories books, including those in English and Spanish in the Ocean-Seven Stories partnership, are sold and distributed by Penguin Random House Publisher Services in North America and worldwide, and through Seven Stories U.K. by Turnaround in England.
Ocean, founded in Melbourne, Australia, in 1989 by David Deutschmann and Deborah Shnookal, focuses Latin American politics and culture. The Ocean Press list includes a deep catalogue of books by Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and others. Together with the Pablo Neruda Foundation and the Foundation Guayasamín, Ocean published a bilingual edition of selections of Neruda's epic poem "Canto General" illustrated by the Ecuadoran indigenous artist Oswaldo Guayasamín. Ocean has published the collected works in 15 volumes of Salvadoran rebel poet Roque Dalton. Other highlights of Ocean's Spanish-language list include John Reed's eyewitness accounts of the Russian and Mexican revolutions, key Marxist classics, works by liberation theologists such as Frei Betto, Miguel d'Escoto and Camilo Torres, and two series: Vidas Rebeldes (Rebel Lives) and Historias desde abajo (History from Below).
Deutschmann approached Seven Stories publisher Dan Simon about forming a partnership because, he said, "one, I knew I could trust them, and two, our publishing programs aligned perfectly due to our shared commitment to politics and literature."