Hello Readers,

My zine is making its way through the world and a few really interesting & exciting people have read it. It’s at one other bookstore besides PSB and I’ll be delivering copies to another in the next little bit. If you work in a bookstore and want to stock it, just let me know! (Link again.)

I kinda dig this zine process. So little time to read and write means even less time for career development stuff like submitting and pitching and though I’ll get time for that back when Alycester starts pre-school in September…I don’t know. I might just want to do more zines. I probably won’t make as much as a I get paid for, like, a LitHub article, but…there really aren’t many other places I can send the kind of writing I do and if it’s not a fit for them (as For White Dudes really wasn’t) well, how much time do I really want to spend researching. I’ve got an idea or two, but if there’s some book world/bookstore/reading topic you’d like to see me write a zine about, let me know!

Also, that’s a lot of hyping my own work. Here’s my favorite newsletter that I subscribe to: Glacial Errata. Every week, Colin Dickey highlights five different things that he finds interesting. Along with always being interesting to me too, it is, I think one of the best uses of the newsletter as a form. The pieces aren’t essays. Sometimes they accumulate towards a kind of unified message but often they don’t. Most of the time (perhaps even here) a newsletter is a replacement form and whatever is being written is, in a perfect world, really an article in a periodical or a post on a blog or something like that. But because a newsletter is often the only medium we have, it’s the one we use. Glacial Errata actually feels like the newsletter is the right medium for the content, so it’s a real treasure in my inbox.

Also, if you’re in greater Boston, Saturday is Independent Bookstore Day and at PSB all recommendations are 20% off. I’ll be there from 9-sometime hopefully not too far into the afternoon if you’d like to get a rec from me.

Josh

P.S. If you like what I’m doing here the best way to support it is to help grow the list of subscribers, so share the sign up link around. Thank you!

YESTERDAY

The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen translated by Don Bartlett

The Unseen is one of those books where the author creates a microcosm that reflects vast swathes of human experience. Family dynamics. Intergenerational tension. Tradition versus innovation. The freedoms of modernity versus the freedoms of isolation. The tensions and conflicts that follow technological progress and the uneven distribution of that progress and the conflicts and tensions that follow from that unevenness. The shrinking of the world. How some distances remain no matter what technology tries to close them. The recklessness of youth. Perhaps even the arrogance of age.

A family on an isolated island thinks about building a quay to make it easier to reach and to be reached from the shore. Some stuff happens because of that while other stuff happens around it. This is, perhaps, why facts are rarely able to convince and compel us the way stories can. A fact can only tell you one thing, while a story can tell you the world.

Buy The Unseen from Porter Square Books

Buy The Unseen from Bookshop.org

TODAY

How to Defend Books and Why: Book Bans and How We Fight Them by Danny Caine

A small group of well-funded and well organized radical Republicans are trying to dictate how you raise your children. One of the ways they are doing this is through book bans and censorship. Unlike other contemporary political ideologies, contemporary conservative thought is inherently authoritarian and oppressive. Just because it is embraced by one of the two major political parties in American does not change the facts of the ideology. It does not make it less bigoted. It does not make it less racist. It does not make it less cowardly. We gain no understanding of anything by stretching to find equivalent actions taken by Democrats, Progressives, and leftists because those equivalents do not exist. The contemporary Republican party is terrified of anyone living a life that even suggests happiness and satisfaction can be found outside of their church, their understanding of wealth, their understanding of freedom. Of course they ban books.

And yet, even today, you won’t see people talk about the partisan alignment of book-banning. They’ll refer to “book-banners” without saying who book-banners always vote for. They’ll stretch the definition of censorship until it’s transparently thin in order to claim it happens on the left too. (Yes, I know one can find examples, but also…can you really? Are they really equivalent? Like, for real?) Whether it’s not wanting to seem partisan, wanting to avoid accusations of bias, or feeling like speaking beyond specific book bans is out of one’s lane or whatever, way too many people in the book world refuse to name the real problem: The Republican Party.

Refreshingly, Danny doesn’t play that game in his new and excellent book. He describes the historic context for contemporary book bans, positioning them in a longstanding and wide-ranging right wing assault on the viability of any other culture but their own. He looks at specific court cases, examines the methods book-banners uses, and talks to people on the ground. The result is book filled with actionable, practical strategies for protecting your rights developed with an understanding of historic and contemporary context, and with a willingness to celebrate the heroes and name the fucking villains.

Buy How to Defend Books from Porter Square Books

Buy How to Defend Books from Bookshop.org

TOMORROW

On the Other Side is March by Solrun Michelsen translated by Marita Thomsen

I picked On the Other Side is March from my galleys from Transit because I’d never read an author writing in Faroese before. I know nothing of the language, the culture, the place, or even where it is in the world. Of course, that’s a big part of why I seek out works in translation, to learn a little something about a part of the world I’m ignorant of. Perhaps even to learn a part of the world exists.

You might here me say versions of this in a couple of different places, but you are not ready for this book. (Well, maybe you are cause I’ve warned you like ten times.) The story is quiet: A woman who is a mother and grandmother is caring for her own mother who is in declining health. The prose is also relatively quiet: realistic images, relatively short sentences, no real digressions, no complex structures. And then some perfect sentence or image or idea punches you in the heart.

We need more books that use acts of care as the engines for their wisdom and power.

It might be a touch odd to say this but the other book I’ve read that On the Other Side is March is…In Search of Lost Time. Yes. Proust. In part it’s because of the role of memory. Caring for her mother shows her one version of her future while inspiring her to remember her own childhood and her mother in good health, and caring for her grandchildren shows her an iteration of her past while she imagines their future and how it relates to the memories she is exploring. Of course, all while still navigating contemporary demands of care. I believe this creates a kind of stretched present that I think is akin to the transcendent state Proust imagines we can access through our memories. But it is also that style I discussed above. Reading both Proust and Michelesen (over much different scales of course!) is like following a burning fuse. You are lead sparking and smoldering along until the fuse hits the detonator and you’ve got to set the book down a bit to recover.

It’ll be really interesting to see what wider response this book gets. I know a couple of other booksellers are behind it. And it does have some of the novelty that can garner coverage from mainstream book media. (NYT, NPR.) Maybe it’ll be a surprise hit of the summer. Regardless, it’s one you all should pick up.

Preorder On the Other Side is March from Porter Square Books

Preorder On the Other Side is March from Bookshop.org

FOREVER

Rails Under My Back by Jeffrey Renard Allen

Our library is in our basement. We had intended the basement to be something of a second living room complete with fold out chairs and such for guests. My desk is down there, as is the record player and all of our physical music media. My partner also has a sewing table and a work bench/tool storage area. Right now though, it’s still mostly storage. There’s a whole bunch of crap left over from the renovation, stuff we’re not sure how to use or if we will end up using it, Costco amounts of things. There isn’t a ton of work between us and that social area, but it’s more than we’ve had time for these last three years, especially since the social would be nice, but isn’t a need.

My toddler went through a phase of playing with some of my partner’s tools down in the basement. He was “fixing the floor” which mostly meant just waving screwdrivers, wrenches, plyers, and what have you around on the floor. It was kind of annoying but it meant I got to hang out in the library a bit. Man, do I miss being surrounded by my books. The piles near my bed just aren’t cutting it. His play space was near the beginning of the alphabet so I nibbled at The Death of Virgil by Herman Broch (which I read ages ago and is absolutely brilliant) and Rails Under My Back by Jeffrey Renard Allen.

I absolutely loved Song of the Shank, Allen’s virtuosic rendition of the life and times of Blind Tom, so bought Rails Under My Back sometime after I finished it. Or maybe around the time he read at Porter Square Books. Either way, it went on the shelf and there it remains. What little I’ve read was cool, but I think it’s the kind of book where you really have to get into its flow to appreciate it.

Another benefit to having a physical library of some kind. You can’t really nibble on a book that happens to catch your eye while you happen to be near it on your phone

Buy Rails Under My Back from Porter Square Books

Buy Rails Under My Back from Bookshop.org

P.S. A QUESTION FOR YOU!

I’m guessing it’s only my ride or dies reading at this point so…Beehiive has been really excited about all the AI “resources” they’re able to offer us creators. Though all that seems pretty avoidable at the moment, it sure doesn’t inspire confidence in terms of a long term relationship with this platform. On top of that, we’re going to start paying for pre-school in the fall and though it’s not that much more than what we’ve been paying our babysitters (especially when we’re talking childcare costs), it’s definitely more!

Which is a long way of saying, I might be looking for a new platform but I think for this newsletter to make sense in the long run it needs to net me, I don’t know, $20-40 per month. You know, just cover a few iced teas. Thank you if you’ve already voted! It’s very helpful. So here’s a little Google survey to help me know if that’s even a possibility. Thank you!