Hello Readers,

Trying to sell books off carts outside PSB’s new location while it couldn’t be open for customers, I discovered an aspect of handselling that I’ve experienced plenty of times without ever really articulating it. Sometimes I learn something about a book because I try to handsell it. For example, thanks to an inspection/permitting SNAFU, PSB couldn’t open in our new location the first weekend we wanted to so the booksellers threw some books on some carts and rolled them out into the lobby. As I was there, a dude came by in a Gogol Bordello t-shirt, and I thought to myself, “Well, I’ve got to sell this guy a book.” I scanned my cart for the books with the most Gogol Bordello energy. I came up with Geek Love and The Story of My Teeth. He bought Story of My Teeth. (I bet he’s read Geek Love.)

I don’t know if I’ve ever noticed the frenetic energy that pulses through Story of My Teeth, or how we could understand its construction as “patchwork,” or even “thrown together,” until I had the lens of gypsy punk in my mind. I highly doubt I ever would have. But because I occasionally have to think about books in very specific contexts, I can sometimes stumble upon these discoveries that end up deepening or broadening my understanding of a book I’m already deeply familiar with. It’s kind of a like a micro-from-memory-performative reread. Neat! (Someday I’ll have time to reread again.)

Josh

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YESTERDAY

The Mushroom at the End of the World by Amy Lowenhaupt Tsing

I’ve been handselling this book for years based on a recommendation from someone else describing it as a great anti-capitalist book. Often that fact, plus the somewhat recent rise in interest in mushrooms in general, was enough to make a sale. With it being already a backlist book by the time I heard of it and the fact that it was not part of the mountain of galleys looming over me, I never actually read it. (Yes, you can handsell books you haven’t read.) Then it appeared in PSB’s bargain bin so I bought a copy. Then I noticed I wasn’t reading any nonfiction. So here we are.

I’m glad I’ve been recommending it because it really is an incredible book, attempting to reframe our entire understanding of how we relate to the world. Precarity. Ruination. Interdependence. Non-anthropocentric thinking. At this stage in my life and reading life, I’ve encountered versions of some of these ideas before (Cristina Rivera Garza’s “vulnerability” & “helplessness,” permaculture, ideas of stewardship) but Lowenhaupt Tsing seems to be finding an interesting and compelling way to bring them all together within the graspable framework of the matsutake mushroom.

But the thing that sticks out for me reading it now, in this specific political moment: we actually know how to solve the most pressing problems that face our society. We know the power of human community. We have solutions for climate change, poverty, homelessness, etc. Do we have the perfect solution for all of them? No, but it would be easy to dramatically reduce the amount of suffering in the world. What we don’t know is a good way to get the rich assholes out of the way so we can start applying them. Answering that question is not the book’s project so I can’t be mad if it doesn’t broach that challenge. But maybe there is something in there, about community, contamination, and fungal networks that, somehow, flips the scenario, and the solution is actually to, somehow, create a way that billionaires cannot get into in the first place.

Buy Mushroom at the End of the World from Porter Square Books

Buy Mushroom at the End of the World from Bookshop.org

TODAY

Comrade Papa by Gauz’ translated by Frank Wynne

A funhouse mirror version of the colonial adventure story, Comrade Papa pokes, prods, & mocks a whole suite of ideologies & assumptions. Gauz’ has an exuberant, nimble style & an off-center imagination that will keep readers on their toes.

That said, I still don’t entirely know what Comrade Papa’s project is and the way the narratives end up intertwining doesn’t resolve that at all. Rather, it almost makes it even more confusing. In a way, every book is actually two books; the text we have is one book and everything the author could have written but didn’t is the other. Some books lean into this fact, constantly directing your attention to what the author has excluded and I think Comrade Papa is definitely one of those, because what we have is THE story of the great grandfather & A story of the great grandson, in a book whose title character is the father, who, himself, is less a character and more a propaganda poster that speaks.

There’s almost something…silly about the whole thing. Which might actually be the primary current Gauz’ is exploring. It is silly to drill propaganda speeches into your child. Perhaps, it is silly to have a child when you’ve already given your soul to a movement. It is silly to trek through a climate filled with conditions and diseases your body has never encountered before in order to make money for other people. I mean dude, you are almost certainly going to die. Your legendary predecessor died at 29. 29! The fuck are you doing?! But, of course, we do these silly things all the time and the problem is not that they often lead to absolute disaster for all involved and impacted. The problem is that sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they lead to something beautiful. Most books, maybe even the vast majority of books, tell stories of the rare and beautiful. That Comrade Papa doesn’t makes it a special book.

Buy Comrade Papa from Porter Square Books. (It’s 20% off in October!)

Buy Comrade Papa from Bookshop.org

TOMORROW

Versailles by Kathryn Davis

If the galley of this new edition of Versailles had reached me, oh say, three years ago, I would have read it already. I probably would have finished it a few weeks after that galley arrived (if that!) and in plenty of time to submit an IndieNext nomination and start hyping it up months before it came out. Now it’s buried with a bunch of other October/November 2024 galleys (It’s an insane couple of months for books!) that I wanted to both read and write about here. (Or at least hype up a bit more on social media.) But we read and write with the time we have and feeling like shit about what we don’t get to doesn’t help anybody.

With Karen Tei Yamashita being honored by the National Book Foundation, Percival Everett having a major moment, and writers like Renee Gladman, Kate Zambreno, and Yuri Herrera, still relatively young, and Helen DeWitt publishing relatively sporadically (although we’re getting another one!), one could argue Davis is America’s most underappreciated novelist. I mean there has to be one, right.

Davis is a special writer, I think, because she has a polyphonic yet singular voice. By that I mean, her books are all very different from each other, even right down to the roots of prose style (thinking of Labrador and The Silk Road) and yet, they still feel unified. You would never mistake Duplex for the work of another writer and it would feel obvious when if (somehow) after reading them you were told Aurelia, Aurelia, or The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf were written by the same person. (Maybe Aira has this polyphonic voice?)

Maybe Davis will have her moment someday, but the thing about moments is, not everyone who deserves one, gets one. Quite the opposite. Nearly everyone who deserves a moment doesn’t get one. There are a lot of different ways we can think about this fact. Today, I’m going to be grateful that we do not need moments to survive.

Preorder Versailles from Porter Square Books

Preorder Versailles from Bookshop.org

FOREVER

Bottom’s Dream by Arno Schmidt translated by John E. Woods

Do we think more than 100 people have actually read all of Bottom’s Dream? More than 50? It’s been out in German long enough that those might be very low estimates, but also, have you seen it? Have you physically tried to read it? The layout and typography are almost opposed to the mechanics of reading most of us are comfortable with.

Personally, I think we need unreadable books, like Bottom’s Dream. We need things beyond our reach to inspire us to stretch. We need art that makes us say, “Welp. Probably will never get there, but let me see what I can find on the way.” We need books that challenge every aspect about how we assume books should work. We need books that remind us that every rule, every convention, every best practice is really just an agreement. (And that we should be suspicious of anyone who claims some method or mode of communication is a law.) We need books to show us that we are not anywhere fucking close to the limit of human creativity and capacity for understanding, (And that we should be extra suspicious of anyone who claims to understand exactly how humans ought to be.) Bottom’s Dream does all of that and I feel lucky to have a copy.

I was almost able to grab a second copy. Some MIT professor was getting rid of one and my partner replied that we’d gladly take it. I guess she replied, like, an hour or something too late, because the motherfucker just THREW IT OUT. I think two copies is the perfect number to have for Bottom’s Dream (if you’re going to have any). You have one to keep beautiful and you have one to make ugly. Give it the old Velveteen Rabbit. Someday, I hope to have a real and true library where I can build a lectern that just holds Bottom’s Dream open. Every now and then I’d read a little bit of whatever page is on, maybe finish it, maybe not, maybe turn the page randomly, maybe try to go in some order, and just leave it there, as, like, a city I’ll never see every street of. I think that’s the best way to do it if you’ve only got one copy. Right now, mine is on an antique crock in what counts as our library for the moment, open as described above, though not as supported as I’d like.

Which is still nice too, the book resting on a container for that which is supposed to age.

[No links for this one because, well, it went out of print, which, you know, that’s fine.]