Hello Readers,

There is a pretty good chance I’m going to skip the May issue and perhaps June as well. I’ve got a project with a pretty decent time commitment and, well, not a whole lot of time I can commit to projects. So never fear if there’s a couple of months of silence. I’ll be back. (And maybe I’ll also find some time in this break to do more organized thinking about what it means to be a bookseller with my goals now that my reading time has been reduced so dramatically. Maybe I’ll find someone to pay me to write that out.)

One lovely show of support for this newsletter that I don’t think I’ve mentioned, if you are so inclined. If you decide to buy a book I recommend from Porter Square Books, please drop a comment in the order saying you heard about the book here. There was a time when the odds of me processing those orders, were pretty high, but no longer, so the only way I would see them, is if another PSB libromancer shared an order comment with me. It would also be great if you let me know, even if you decide to the get a book from your local based on my recommendation. Knowing that is, well, just nice of course, but it’s also useful for me to know what recommendations have an impact. It’d be helpful to know if certain types or styles or angels hit better than others. Given how informally and organically I compose this newsletter, I doubt that info would change all that much, whether we’re talking about the types of books I select or how I talk about them, but I want to continue getting better at this and feedback is one way to do that.

As always, thanks for reading.

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

A multi-generational family saga, an origin story for a nation, an examination of the complexities of personal identity, and a reckoning with the weight of the past; Makumbi’s debut novel (and smash bestseller in Uganda) of a cursed clan is historical fiction at its best.

In the past I’ve described Kintu as “user friendly” because of how amenable to interpretation Makumbi’s presentation of the cursed name is. The book easily supports reading the curse as a metaphor for hereditary mental illness, generational trauma, and/or any number of impersonal forces—like colonialism—that shape a society, a nation, a community, over time. Like many of the works of Victor Lavalle, Kintu can, with relative ease, become (within reason) just about any book you want it to be. “User friendly” is a handy entrance point to a conversation, but deeper thinking about the phrase or idea leads to questions. There are more general questions like the idea of “uses” of literature, but also Makumbi is keenly aware of Western reading of colonized cultures. Given that, the idea of “using” the book for anything that feels natural or obvious to me, practically demands an interrogation of my own reading assumptions and biases.

With the space I’ve got here (and to potentially build something of a theme for this newsletter), I think one of the problems is the word “use” and the connotations it carries. It’s such a general, vague, verb that it shouldn’t be that hard to extract it from the implications that you are reducing a person or culture or creation to the status of a tool. There should a way to interact with and appreciate things that are rightly thought of as tools without carrying an implication of exploitation. We should be able to talk about the “uses of literature” without being yoked to the ways people and places have been used. But, of course, we have to take the yoke off first and that takes work.

(Note, links go to the forthcoming 10th anniversary edition, because it looks like the original isn’t available new anymore.)

Buy Kintu from Porter Square Books.

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TODAY

There is, of course, something sad about Traces of Enayat. Our world just isn’t a world in which Enayat would ever find justice. No one with power cares enough about literature. no one in power understands that the writers, books, movies, bands, songs, works of art passionately beloved by only a few other people are vital part of the engine of all human creation. There’s not a whole lot of evidence that anyone in power has much interest in using that power to keep other people alive even when it would be so easy to do so. There is something blinding about power.

But, of course, there is much beauty in the sadness of Traces of Enayat, Mersal’s lyrical investigation into and excavation of the writer Enayat al-Zayyat, who died by suicide a few years before her one novel (Love & Silence) was published. Finding Enayat’s friendships, the suggestion of a late love after her divorce, evidence of an ambitious second novel in progress. In elucidating the life she did live, we can imagine that better life she could have lived. There is always something beautiful about a quest. Even, or especially, when the quest can never truly succeed.

It feels like a cliche to say that when you go searching for someone else, you only end up finding yourself. But there are different ways to get to a phrase, and some of those ways are easy, even lazy, so when you say, “In the end the real treasure was friendship,” everyone who hears you ends up convinced friendship is a con, and some of those ways are hard, mixing meander and obsession, willing to run into dead ends, willing to run through dead ends, so that when you say, “Ultimately, Mersal learned less about Enayat the person and the writer than about Egypt, archives, and cultural memory, forcing her to confront (almost entirely off-page if I remember correctly) the possibility of her own life and literature being forgotten,” you see the real depth below the “you end up finding yourself,” that can be there.

If you need something like A Ghost in the Throat (and really who doesn’t?) Traces of Enayat is what you’re looking for. I think there is also a touch of Kate Zambreno in here as well, thought Mersal does not write with the same claws Zambreno does.

Buy Traces of Enayat from Porter Square Books

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TOMORROW

What happens when you write poetry towards a better world, poetry that is critically acclaimed, poetry that wins awards, poetry that even sells books, and a tragedy where you live creates the best opportunity in your lifetime to get closer to that better world…and we don’t. Millions of people march in the street. Mundane language changes. There is violence. There is civil disobedience. A police precinct burns. And then. And then? Nothing? Something like nothing? How do you feel about your poetry after that? Its relationship to that better world? Do you believe in its potential? Are you afraid that “liking” your poetry is another way for white people to feel good about themselves without doing a damn thing to make the world better for Black people or anybody else? What do you do with your next poetry collection? Do you even write one?

Bluff is a tough collection. Yes, Smith is still writing powerful, evocative, impactful poems, but by juxtaposing them against tragedies (like in the astonishing poem about the destruction of a Black neighborhood by the building of a highway), Smith won’t let us look away from the question they asked themselves: Do my poems help? Or do they actually facilitate the survival of injustice? To add another layer, what does it mean for a white person like me, to hype Smith’s poetry? Am I using it as part of my own work towards that better world or am I just making myself feel better about the state of the world and my place in it? I mean, there are plenty of white people who act as though cheerleading the purchasable creations of marginalized identities is all that’s required of them.

But “Minneapolis, Saint Paul,” alone is a towering achievement, a poem that maybe should be thought of alongside “Howl.” There are poems pushing on the visual experimentations of Dada and concrete poetry. There are pages that look like they belong in a book by Mark Danielewski. There are lines that will break your heart. Bluff deserves to have cheerleaders. Bluff deserves to create accomplices. But, unfortunately, whether it does or not will have less to do with Smith and Bluff than we us, the readers.

Preorder Bluff from Porter Square Books.

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FOREVER

As with most books in the Forever category, I didn’t finish The Road Beneath My Feet by Frank Turner, because I didn’t need to finish in order to sell it at the bookstore. If you’re a fan of Frank Turner, you’re likely to want it. If not, well, I’m sure there are readers who enjoy tour diaries of band they’re not into, but I haven’t met one.

I probably should stop including intros like that for my Forever books in part because the reason for the DNF is almost always the same, but, more importantly, because justifying putting a book down runs counter to the whole Forever project. You don’t need to finish a book to get something positive out of it, to enjoy, even to love it. There is nothing wrong with enjoying, even loving, accomplishment, but you create a kind of fragility when you need specific, tangible, check-off-able accomplishments in order to feel valuable. A need for accomplishment is a close kin to a need to feel productive (something I certainly struggle with) and it’s not far from a need to feel productive to an easily exploitable need to produce.

The book world likes to argue that reading is an inherently good activity, that as long as you’re reading, you can’t be making things worse, which just cannot be true. (Oh hey! There’s Ayn Rand and the permission she gave rich selfish dickheads to stomp on the shit out of the world and everyone else in it.) Something cannot be both powerful and completely free of misuse. Both what you read and how you read change the impact you have on yourself and the world through your reading. A compulsion to finish books can certainly help you finish books, but if it is a compulsion, if you feel like you have failed if you don’t finish a book, it can also reinforce the idea that people need to prove their value. One of the worst ideas there is. There’s a little more here that I don’t quite have a handle on yet, about how we can read in ways opposed to the idea of “consumption” and how being satisfied with a book without finishing it connects to that opposition, but I’ll have to think more about that to get a handle on it. I’m not saying that you’re a capitalist shill if you finish every book you start or that that you’re a Bartleby-esque revolutionary if you never finish a book, but that we need to think about how we read along with what we read and interrogate how we got those habits and what they can mean for ourselves and the world we move through.

So Frank Turner is probably the most important musician in my life. The Road Beneath My Feet is essentially a tour journal for the first half-to-three-quarters of his career at the time he wrote it. It’s pretty interesting. He’s a better songwriter than he is a prose writer. I enjoyed what I read and didn’t finish it. That’s all.

Buy The Road Beneath My Feet from Porter Square Books

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