Hello Readers,

After I finished my essay series about how the publishing world should respond to Trump 2.0 (Anyone know if any Big 5 CEOs read it?) I was a bit lost with what I should do. With the kiddo, I just didn’t have nearly as much space for activism (or anything else really) in my life than I used to and grappling with that at a time when my home needed more activism from everyone than maybe ever, was hard. I’d seen from a number of different sources that a fundamental key to successful and sustainable activism is to find a focus. If you try to fight the whole world, the whole world is going to win every single time. You don’t need the whole saga, but I eventually landed on running the BlueSky accounts for Authors Against Book Bans and Massachusetts Authors Against Book Bans. I don’t know what it does, but I think there’s some practical evidence that that work does something along with keeping me from losing from my fucking mind.

So that is a little personal context intro for me doing a little fundraising. Authors Against Book Bans is now officially a nonprofit that can accept donations. (Right here. And tell ‘em who sent you if you can.) Everything we’ve accomplished so far has been 100% volunteer work using personal accounts and free versions of software. Imagine what we could accomplish if we could, for example, pay for authors and other advocates to travel to board meetings or to give testimony at legislatures. If our state chapter leaders had authorsagainstbookbans.org email addresses for their organizing. If we could get beyond playing whack-a-mole against bans and bad policies and start building towards a truly sustainable future for the world of books and reading. (And we’ve got merch now!) I’m really proud of the work we’ve done so far and know that with a few more resources, we can do even more.

Ok, on to the books, featuring another nice thread between a couple titles, some memory-laneing for me, and a title actually relevant to that whole little spiel above.

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 Hole by Jose Revueltas translated by Amanda Hopkinson & Sophie Hughes

I’m thinking of The Hole this month because of Revueltas’s presences in Cristina Rivera Garza’s forthcoming book, Autobiography of Cotton, which is this month’s Tomorrow title. The Hole is a cross between Blood Meridian, Train Dreams, and Jean Genet’s works set in prisons. Yes, Revueltas fits all of that into into this little explosive seed. Reading it is about a four hour experience; one hour to read it and three hours to stare at a wall recovering from it. (I’m now realizing I’ve used that “X time to read, Y time to recover” formula more than a few times over the years, but there’s a pretty solid chance that, all the way back in 2018, this was the first time I did!)

At the time, I didn’t know a thing about Revueltas except whatever was in the book itself, so though I knew a real life prison stay had inspired The Hole, I didn’t know that particular stay was actually one of several he had over the course of his life as a political activist or how much of his other work was actually drawn from that activism. As you can probably tell from the blurb above, The Hole is a wild ride. Surreal. Mercurial. I wonder how all that strangeness would read knowing how much practical political activism filled rest of his life. I have argued elsewhere (Sea, Poison most recently I think) that surreality and absurdity can be powerful tools both for critiquing our existing mundane and imagining a better one & The Hole seems like a great opportunity to engage specifically with that power.

Buy The Hole from Porter Square Books (which is backordered, alas)

Buy The Hole from Bookshop.org

TODAY

Saint the Terrifying by Joshua Mohr

I was a big fan of Joshua Mohr’s Damascus and really enjoyed Fight Song as well. I lost track of him a bit, despite having a really cool event with him way back, so when I saw a fun preorder campaign for his Viking punk rock detective novel that came with an actual punk record I ordered it. No idea if he even remembers me but it’s nice to show support for people you have even a tenuous connection to. (It occurs to me that one thing various titans of industry don’t understand or refuse to recognize is that connections between people are valuable in and of themselves. We will seek them out. We will pay for them. And we’ll avoid products and services that don’t have them.)

Saint the Terrifying is going to be catnip to some readers. Saint is a one-eyed ex-con with training in Nordic martial arts just trying to stay sober and keep himself alive in the gutteryest of Oakland’s gutter punk scene. (Complete with just relentless hate for Green Day, who I think is good!) Imagine Barfly crossed with an all ages church basement hardcore show with some classic detective pulp thrown in and you’ll get a sense of the vibe. See? If you’re into it, you’re into it.

Some books, even some genre books, are really only about their aesthetics (Or as I’ve said in other contexts, sometimes you only hear the volume.) and, to me, at least, there is something freeing to engaging with a work of art that actually doesn’t ask you to look beyond itself. There is still room for challenging thought within that engagement with aesthetics of course and some aesthetics include within them space for broader considerations, of course, but it is still nice to be reminded of and to play in the space created by art that is just for itself.

Buy Saint the Terrifying from Porter Square Books

Buy Saint the Terrifying from Bookshop.org

TOMORROW

Autobiography of Cotton by Cristina Rivera Garza translated by Christina MacSweeney

What is your heritage? How was it built? Who else had a hand in building it? Who was pushed aside to build it and what does that violence mean (if anything) for how we relate to each other today? How does your life today change, if at all, when you learn something new about your past? In Autobiography of Cotton Rivera Garza learns that her grandparents were in a place during a potential strike that Jose Revueltas was and may have interacted with him. Revueltas was there as a representative of the Communist Party to help organize the farmers. Though he was only there a little over a week before the authorities threw him in jail, his time there would plant a seed for one of his books, Human Mourning.

Rivera Garza’s book explores that brief moment in time, her family’s long journey to and through it, her contemporary efforts to reconnect with the place and places she could think of as “places of origin,” and the broader social, political, and environmental forces that shaped all of that. So far, it’s shaping up to be one of the great works of social realism in recent memory, filled with brilliant moments of political, social, and cultural insight that reveal the relationship between big society-wide forces (war, drought, plague, organizing/activism) and personal impacts and choices. If you’ve liked Yuri Herrera’s work, especially his two most recent books, you’ll definitely dig Autobiography of Cotton. And, obviously, if you know Rivera Garza, that same genius you see in all her work is here too. I’ll also just add that I’m basically flying through this and may actually finish it before it’s released, which, if you know anything about my current reading life, is maybe all I needed to say.

I also have to say, it is intriguing to me to see Rivera Garza win a Pulitzer Prize and publish a novel with a Big 5 (which is supposed to be brilliant and is due out in paperback this spring as well!) and then return to the indies for this one. It could have been a longer standing contract. Or maybe said Big 5 didn’t know how to sell this. Or something else. This certainly doesn’t say anything about the book itself and it might not say anything about the publishing industry at all given how much turnover and change their can be. But, the year(ish) after a Big Five finally takes a swing on Percival Everett and gets rewarded with a National Book Award and a smash bestseller in hardcover, Rivera Garza returns to indies AFTER a major prize, well, it is intriguing to me.

Preorder Autobiography of Cotton from Porter Square Books

Preorder Autobiography of Cotton from Bookshop.org

FOREVER

Joyful Militancy by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman

See, the thing is, once the ICE raids have stopped, we’ll still have the organizations, connections, and rapid response networks we used to fight them and we can use those resources to solve different problems. Imagine all of the neighbors who came together to scream insults at ICE agents, were able to redirect that time, energy, and anger to removing from power ever single politician that enabled ICE in the first place. Imagine them turned to mutual aid networks and labor solidarity.

Once all the book banners have been removed from American politics, the Authors Against Book Bans discord and mailing list will still be there, as will all the personal connections authors have made with each other through their activism. What could we do with the skills we developed in this fight after we win it? What can libraries look like in ten years?

And what happens when we have a few minutes to catch our fucking breaths and begin to stitch all of our individual lanes together; to connect food insecurity and gun violence to education and freedom of expression to labor rights to environmental justice and climate resilience and to bodily autonomy?

We’re not just fighting for today. We’re fighting for tomorrow too.

I don’t know how much of Joyful Militancy I’ll get through. I bought it to support a friend’s bookstore that I think does incredible activist work and I started it because it fit well in my pocket and I hoped to read a bit of it while my son and my partner looked for rocks on Revere Beach. But I like AK Press, the vibes of the book are good, and even if I’m not able to build a brain that can truly meet this moment, at least I can build a library that does.

Buy Joyful Militancy from Porter Square Books

Buy Joyful Militancy from Bookshop.org