Hello Readers,

I’m a little behind this month because I lost a couple days or so to COVID (gross) and because it’s harvest season (great) so I’m spending more time blanching, freezing, drying, cooking, making shrubs, etc.

I wanted to start this by saying the last couple of weeks have been especially weird for someone who has been involved in the fight over free speech for a few years, but actually, it hasn’t been weird, The right has been doing the same thing it has done since at least Gamergate (though controlling expression is baked into authoritarian & supremacist movements) and the mushy middle is, by and large, falling for it once again. Whether the machine finally chewing up a famous rich white man finally move the needle in the mainstream remains to be seen.

The big burst of energy around independent media generated by Kimmel’s canceling has been encouraging though, and I’m excited to see what comes out of it. There’s already been some great work on this front over the last year or so, but I finally pulled the trigger on a couple subscriptions so hopefully a lot of other people have too. Even with Kimmel being reinstated after a huge outcry, I’m hoping that energy towards independent continues. I’ve also been thinking of ways Porter Square Books, with it’s limited but extant resources, can contribute. Start publishing reviews on our website? Gather them into a monthly newsletter? Start a printed, in store newsletter with reviews, interviews, & short essays? (Mini-versions of what I called for here.) Just keep plugging online on BlueSky? If anyone of those ideas seem good to you, or if you have any of your own ideas, I’d love to hear them!

And while I’m talking about The Work, let me plug Authors Against Book Bans (which I can’t remember if I’ve done in the newsletter.) If you are an author, getting on the email list and discord gives you access to a ton of resources from education, to speaking opportunities, to rapid responses to bans, to practical actions. If you’re not an author, you should follow AABB on BlueSky & Instagram cause we’re always putting out calls to action that everyone can take. Just about every weekday, we share something you can do to help protect books. One thing every day folks. Keep the odometer turning over.

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

Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo Fresan translated by Will Vanderhayden

One of my favorite MST3K skits happens in the Prince of Space episode. For very dubious reasons, the Satellite of Love is traveling through a worm hole, which causes, among other things, Tom Servo, Mike, and Crow to be on timelines about 3 seconds apart. I love this because it very much is a Science Fiction scenario and yet it requires exactly zero special effects. They just deliver their totally mundane lines in an atypical order and you have science fiction. Nothing against lasers and robots and space ships and all that cool stuff, but you don’t always need shiny things to tell a story that involves technology we have not invented yet or to grapple with the possibility of other intelligent life in the universe.

I mean so much weird shit just happens on Earth anyway, so many patterns, so many coincidences, so much just unexplained shit, and people do so much weird shit and can be so weird about other shit (as Fresan really explores in Bottom of the Sky) that there is plenty of space to create sci fi narratives without leaving the atmosphere. Bottom of the Sky doesn’t always stick that close to the soil but the vast majority of it is about some dudes being weird in ways that were sometimes interesting for other people and sometimes pretty uncomfortable for the focus of their weirdness! Also, I think Bottom of the Sky opens a potentially interesting genre conversation exploring the nexus between science fiction and historical fiction. More on that below.

I may have written about Bottom of the Sky in this newsletter before, but it gives a nice frame for this month’s Tomorrow book and it’s a great book so it’s definitely worth revisiting.

Buy Bottom of the Sky from Porter Square Books

xBuy Bottom of the Sky from Bookshop.org

TODAY

Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto

There’s a general argument to the be made that the most commercially successful books tend to be books with slight, but, noticeable tweaks to existing narrative formulas. Which, even without delving into any specifics…just makes a lot of sense. The formula makes it accessible and the tweaks make it interesting, giving readers (and the few reviewers who are left) something to talk about, which helps create that absolutely vital word-of-mouth publicity that smash hits need. Of course, sometimes those tweaks can have bigger broader impacts on, if not the plot of the book, than its relationship to the broader cultural context. Gender-swapped or other identity-swapped stories being obvious examples. But even just putting a formulaic narrative in a different place can create that broader cultural, and thus, political context.

Sorry, that’s what my brain immediately started doing when I decided to highlight Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto an entertaining, thoughtful, and (at time of writing) relatively formulaic One Last Score Heist. Another PSB bookseller staff picked it last month and it caught my eye on a Day Where I Needed to Buy a Book Because Everything (you know exactly what I mean), so I bought it. The protagonist is the perfect “ex-con trying to go straight,” the target is the perfect “Oh, this fucker deserves it,” the team of misfits & rogues, misfity & rogue-ish. The prose is solid, the pace is a nice mix of chopping-right-along and establishing-emotional-context. And it’s rooted in the culture of Hawai’i and features queer characters. So, if you need a book to help distract you from that stuff I mentioned in the intro, Hammajang Luck is a good choice. 

(Quick note: To me the cover makes the protagonist look like a teenager, but he’s not. Anyway)

Buy Hammajang Luck from Porter Square Books

Buy Hammajang Luck from Bookshop.org

TOMORROW

Beings by Ilana Masad

Much like Bottom of the Sky, there isn’t a whole lot that’s shiny in Masad’s Beings; in fact, potentially nothing at all. But whether you believe aliens exist (either in our world or in the world of Beings) trauma certainly does. By rooting her sci fi story in a historic alien abduction narrative, Masad pulls away a few of the curtains sci fi (another genres) often uses to talk around its main topics. Though those curtains, of course, can still create powerful confrontations with those difficult topics, it’s still refreshing to me to see someone use some of the structures of sci fi to still confront the issue head on.

The narrative has three currents; a close third-person account of the Barney and Betty Hill abduction and its long aftermath in their lives, the letters (and maybe some other documents) of an essentially unknown woman sci fi writer who was discovering her queerness and her literary voice, and a contemporary character called The Archivist who is going through the sci fi writer’s papers and who, themselves, apparently had an encounter with aliens as a child. I’m far enough in that I’m starting to see how these currents will braid together and though I don’t have a sense of everything ahead of me, I feel like a central theme has accumulated. Masad is asking one of the big questions of literature: how can we truly know another person’s story? And once we ask that question, you can’t help but ask, how can anyone truly know mine?

I don’t know if it’s a helpful frame for the book or not, but I am kinda tickled by the idea that (slightly different from Bottom of the Sky) Beings is straight ahead historical fiction if you believe the abduction of Barney & Betty Hill happened. Even if you don’t, the phenomena of whatever the abduction was make up such a small percentage of the book, that if you’re just going by word count, calling this historical fiction makes far more sense than calling it sci fi. And yet, there’s a flying saucer on the cover. Fun!

Also, Masad is going to be reading at Porter Square Books in October!

P.S. Yeah, it’s out today. Listen, I said I was late this month!

Preorder Beings from Porter Square Books

Preorder Beings from Bookshop.org

FOREVER

Tracker by Alexis Wright (and many others, it’s kinda complicated)

Does it feel like cheating, a little, to buy a book and then immediately talk about it as something I’ll be reading forever? Maybe, but Tracker is a chonk and given that I’m a bit more committed to Your Name Here (what a fucking ride that book is) & a few other books I’ve already started, I know I won’t finish it anytime soon. Also, it’s my newsletter. (Also, there’s a nonzero chance I do the Buy & Forever technique again soon. Can you guess what it is?)

Through one of my WIPs I’ve been thinking a lot about the collective nature of writing books. Books like Opacities and Tone both explore this idea in various ways (as does The Long Form, but in a much less direct way), but Tracker is an almost radical embrace of the idea. Alexis Wright is the only name on the cover of the book, and I feel like that is correct, in the exact same way that Studs Terkel’s name is the only one on the cover of his books, but the text includes words by Tracker himself, his brothers, some of his caretakes, and dozens more people he knew, lived with, worked with, interacted with, was friends with, had heard good stories about him…There is actually an appendix of biographies of everyone who contribute! Which is, really, the only remotely accurate way the story of any life, whether as big and ambitious as Tracker’s or not, can be told. There is no singular perspective. Every life is worthy of a chorus telling its story. (See above about how we can ever know another person’s story and how our story can ever be known.)

Which is, of course, what all (or all the real) biographers do, they just tend to bury that chorus in the footnotes and/or appendix, while writing in a singular voice. Which isn’t necessarily incorrect, citing written documents is a different type of chorus that recording direct testimony, but it isn’t exactly right either. In some contexts that amalgamated singular voice is just one of the fissures in the map/territory tension that all works of art or all representative works have, but in a culture that fetishes individuality in ways that isolate people and compromise collective and communal health, that amalgamated singular is problematic, perhaps even pernicious. And, of course, in the case of Tracker, you also have to reckon with the fact that that singular voice is a colonizer voice.

Tracker (I think, I’m not that far in) pushes that idea further, arguing that a life as singular as Tracker Tilmouth’s, doesn’t just deserve a chorus to tell, but, in fact, is a chorus itself. Every voice narrating in the book was also a part of creating his life. The impact he had on the people around him is also part of creating his life. Their interpretations of that impact are also a part of creating his life. And not just Tracker’s of course. From this perspective none of us are actually distinct individuals but, rather, nodes of complex communal phenomena. Whether or not that’s a truly more accurate description/depiction of human life, it is certainly less lonely.

Buy Tracker from Porter Square Books

Buy Tracker from Bookshop.org