Hello Readers,

I had not articulated this hope to myself before, but seeing just about all of my favorite publishers post about having their NEA grants canceled (you know, the money they had already been awarded and budgeted for) I realized I had selfishly hoped that some of the things that enrich my life just wouldn’t be noticed. That the destroyers wouldn’t even know they existed to be destroyed. But that, of course, was foolish. They want to destroy both everything they see as a direct threat to their power AND everything that anyone else might find strength, solidarity, solace, and joy from. They want to destroy both as active practice and to establish destruction as the state of existence under their rule. They were already coming for libraries. Of course they would come for publishers too and of course they would start with the publishes they have leverage over.

A part of me wanted to focus this issue on one specific publisher, but when I looked through the full list of publishers that had their grants canceled I realized there has been at least one book from at least one of the publishers (and usually quite a bit more) in every issue of YTTF. Honestly, I’d bet 60-80% of the books I recommend come from those publishers, so changing the format of this newsletter to focus on one at a time doesn’t really do a whole lot more.

So here’s what I’m going to do. (And why I’m rushing this one out faster than I usually do.) The first 25 people who email me a receipt for a direct donation or a purchase of books (from a local indie or Bookshop.org) of $20 or more, I’ll send them a signed copy of my pamphlet The Least We Can Do. (Uh, and you’re mailing address, too, obviously.) For $50 or more, I’ll include a book from my library or maybe the PSB galley room. For $100 or more, I’ll hand annotate the copy of The Least We Can Do if you want. (I promise the annotations won’t just be “I told you so!” over and over again.) Here’s a full list of orgs who have had their funding canceled, including the publishers I’m looking to support.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve grown more confident that some version of the United States of America will survive this and those of us who survive as well will have the opportunity to build a far better world than we live in now. So we do as much as we can to help as many people and things make it to the other side. I don’t think I have enough clout to make a big impact, but if I can nudge a great publisher or two through this particular crisis, I’ll be proud.

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

Ban en Banlieu by Bhanu Kapil

This is such a badass book.

This dense and beautiful book hits on gender, race, violence, and art, taking the first few moments of a riot and meditating and expanding on them until those moments tentacle out to touch on wider currents and facets of society. The act of creation, of poetry, of storytelling is the centerpiece of Kapil’s brilliant book, so I highly recommend this for writers and other artists.

Ban en Banlieu is a tough book that asks a lot of its readers. It is exactly the kind of book that only gets published by small, daring presses like Nightboat and all of the other presses that just had their funding pulled.

Buy Ban en Banlieu from Porter Square Books

Buy Ban en Banlieu from Bookshop.org

TODAY

Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Melikah Abdelmoumen translated by Catherine Khrodoc

Sometimes I appreciate a book as much for what it suggests is possible as for the specific ideas it articulates. Abdelmoumen’s use of the relationship between James Baldwin and William Styron to understand some of the major currents in her life as well as some broader currents and tensions in writing and reading today. The book then produces both Abdelmoumen’s ideas and interpretations and a guide, or structure, even just inspiration, for one’s own investigation. For someone who builds so much of my understanding of the world through reading and writing, books like this (and like A Horse at Night, another fantastic book you should read!) almost feel like a community meeting, like I’m spending time with someone else who understands and validates one of the techniques I’ve chosen to make my way in the world.

The centerpiece of the book’s exploration of The Confessions of Nat Turner, the novel the Styron wrote at the behest of Baldwin, in which Styron tried to put himself into the perspective of Nat Turner a Black man who lead and was executed for a slave uprising. Abdelmoumen, then, cannot avoid broaching questions about writing the other generally and what it means for a white Southerner, a grandson of slave owners, to write in the voice of a Black man and slave. I don’t think Abdelmoumen’s exploration offers any easy answers to the questions of writing the other (because I don’t think there is an easy answer beyond “Respect your subject and write with a recognition of your relationship to it), but I think Styron’s reaction, at least as portraited here, is instructive. Whatever his personal intellectual and emotional reactions to the backlash—and there certainly was backlash—he did not counterattack his critics. In fact he even engaged in an open respectful debate with one of his harshest critics (moderated by Baldwin himself) in which he let his critic have the last word.

Of course, we don’t know if Styron would have handled the critique differently if he’d had the reactionary diction of “cancel culture” and an easily mobilized cultural and social media army to rise to his defense. But I would like to hope other aspects of Styron’s life, like his opposition to capital punishment, his personal struggles with depression, and, of course, his friendship with Baldwin, would have lead him to act in the exact same way as he did then; validation of the ideas & emotions of those critiquing him, respectful defense of his personal vision & process, and willingness to engage with critiques. Or, you know, don’t be a dick, especially to people who are engaged in the same process of art and culture as you are.

Buy Baldwin, Styron, & Me from Porter Square Books

Buy Baldwin, Styron, & Me from Bookshop.org

TOMORROW

Crocosmia by Miranda Mellis

Imagine setting a post-apocalyptic story in paradise, in a version of our world where we have actually solved the climate-crisis and begun building a truly sustainable human world. Plenty of authors have used speculated disaster and collapse to explore and expose the problems of our current world and though I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with that process of investigation, I really appreciate imagining from a different direction.

And I gotta say, the fact that the “sudden turn,” the world takes away from total destruction and towards healing and sustainability starts when seven “world leaders” all have their head fall off, you know, it has some appeal to me at the moment.

Despite the global scope, it is still a focused personal story; the story of a young woman who has lost her mother, as nearly all of us do at some point in our lives. This gives the radical vision something of an anchor as we see into the emotional state of a individual living through it. But even then, the aspect of the book I’m most enjoying now is that radical vision. There are just so many terms! So many phrases! Some I’m familiar with, some I’m familiar enough with radical politics that I can parse on my own, and some are thrillingly opaque, at least to me.

I know this aspect of the book will annoy the shit out of some people, evoking the image of that elbow-patched snobbish professor or that bearded occasional-Jacobin quoting mansplainer, but, what, exactly have the radical intellectuals been wrong about? Maybe nuclear power, but even then, at the time the left was really organizing against nuclear power plants the existential threat posed by carbon generating power plants wasn’t really known so, maybe call that one neutral. And yes, the radical left has struggled with racism, sexism, classism, elitism, and ableism, but, like, just like every other aspect of society, including those fighting for various authoritarian controls, so I don’t think it’s fair to call those flaws problems of the left, and though, sure, there have been many mistakes and missteps and the various leftist movements haven’t always worked well together or messaged their goals effectively to the broader public, but by and large, yesterday’s radical leftist ideology is today’s liberal status quo. (Which makes it just super fucking fun time delightful watching our current liberal status quo kneecapping our current leftist movements! Just the fucking best!)

Ultimately, this is book that feels committed to dreaming big and this is the exact struggle that demands big dreams.

Preorder Crocosmia from Porter Square Books. (We might even be able to get a signed copy for you since an event with Mellis is in the works!)

Preorder Crocosmia from Bookshop.org

FOREVER

The Invented Part, The Dreamed Part, The Remembered Part by Rodrigo Fresan translated by Will Vanderhyden

I read The Dreamed Part shortly after it came out in English. I didn’t realize it was the second book in a trilogy when I picked it up, but well Fresan’s world and vision is so wild and the central concept itself so inherently flexible, I didn’t get the sense that the ground beneath my feet would have been noticeably more solid had I started at the beginning. Almost the instant I got my hands on The Invented Part and The Remembered part I joked to myself (and maybe on Twitter and maybe even in an earlier edition of this newsletter) that I was looking forward to retirement so I could read the whole trilogy back to back. (Even in my before-Alyce reading life, sticking with a massive trilogy like this would have created pretty significant gaps in my awareness of new books and I got a reputation to maintain!) But once I can retire, I can reread Proust and read Fresan’s trilogy as a single work.

For all the pyrotechnics, I think the section that most convinced me the trilogy would be something special and that Fresan is a unique author is the long (over a hundred pages if I remember correctly!) passage about…Wurthering Heights. Whatever you think of Wuthering Heights itself, it is a gutsy, gutsy move to spend, well, really any amount of narrative time on a book vastly more famous than your own. One of the risks you run of referencing another work (and I do tend to like referential literature and actually even enjoying encountering something I’m sure is a reference to a work that I’ve never read) is that you invite readers familiar with the work to compare it to your own and find your work lacking. You can mitigate this risk by writing something that is clearly a very different project than the book you’re referencing as Fresan did here (and I as did in Exaggerated Murder with all my silly Joyce references) but the risk is never erased.

As I’m slowly making an awe-struck way through Melvill, dog-earing damn near half the pages for absolutely brilliant lines, Fresan is solidifying himself as one of my favorite authors. Like Ban en Banlieu and Crocosmia, and so many of the works I try to highlight in this newsletter and in my work as a bookseller, this risk publishing a trilogy like this poses seems to almost exclusively fall to the small presses that need outside funding, like that until recently provided by the NEA to survive. Having written that sentence, it’s clear a deeper, critical interrogation needs to be done as to why the richest, most well-resourced publishers, those most able to afford risks like these, don’t take them, but that is for another time and maybe for another person.

Buy The Invented Part from Porter Square Books

Buy The Invented Part from Bookshop.org