Month: August 2020

With the BLM movement sweeping the world, Black books and bookstores have been in the news for months for both providing urgent reading and for simply existing in the first place. Admit it, many of you had never heard of most of these places. I’ve been ordering through various stores here and there and they’ve been doing the best work they can getting titles in my hands. Oprah Magazine has even released a lovely map of 123 Black-owned bookstores in America.

Marcus Books, one of the country’s best-known and oldest Black bookstores, was cofounded in 1960 in San Francisco by two African American doctors, husband-and-wife team Julian and Raye Richardson. Rising rents forced Marcus Books to close its San Francisco store six years ago, but it moved to Oakland.

The pandemic hit a few weeks after Raye’s death, at age 99, on February 11. “We closed briefly due to the death of our mother,” said Blanche Richardson, Julian and Raye’s daughter, who now runs Marcus Books. “Then the Covid-19 rules came down and we had to cancel plans for her memorial as well as our 60th anniversary celebrations and events. We stayed ‘open’ to receive book deliveries and take phone and mail orders. Later, we instituted curbside pick up, then allowed customers to come into the store as long as they followed the Covid safety guidelines.”

Richardson had taken down the store’s website in early February in order to make upgrades. “We did create a temporary method for online purchases but were overwhelmed with 200–300 orders a day,” she said. “We shut it down in order to fulfill all of the orders.” The new site is expected to be up in September; in the meantime, Richardson is taking orders over the phone.

I hate seeing violence and destruction, but the armchair revolutionary in me knows it is often necessary for change. Fuck the statues, and flags, and buildings, and institutions of oppression; but please, everyone lay off the libraries. Yes, they’re often filled with misinformation and oppression-enabling texts, but the best way to discredit and destroy those thoughts is with new ones. Leave the words alone so the future worlds we build can track how we got to this point and see where we went after. This book on burning books outlines what we’ve lost.

A third of the way into his rich and meticulous 3,000 year history of knowledge and all the ways it may be preserved (or not), Richard Ovenden casually mentions that he and his wife once had to clear the house of a family member – a job that involved deciding which letters and diaries should be saved, and which, ultimately, destroyed. As he notes, such decisions are taken everywhere, every day, with few consequences. But occasionally, the fate of such documents can have profound consequences for culture, particularly if the deceased person had a public life. Think of Byron’s publisher, John Murray, tearing up and then burning the manuscript of his memoirs at his house in Albemarle Street; of Philip Larkin’s secretary, Betty Mackereth, feeding his diaries, sheet by sheet, into a Hull University shredder.

• AI: coming for the authors next;
• Will there ever be a “true” adaptation of a Stephen King work?;
• What happens when you read the first page of a book without knowing the book itself, the author, or when it was published?;
• The “coolest” book club on Instagram;
• How Van Morrison influenced (hometown) Belfast writing;
• Still fighting fascism from the grave: Leonard Cohen vs. Trump;
• Poetry Foundation hands out some big awards;
• Economist tells Chinese censors to bite it;
• I feel like I linked to this a while back, but in case I didn’t: someone’s contraband stash of beer and gum from the 80s exhumed in library clean;
• How to start keeping a journal (not a problem, it’s sustaining it, amirite);
• Monday Funday: some authors who would have been terrible on Twitter (as opposed to the ones who are currently terrible there);
• Imagine having access to Sir Isaac Newton’s handwritten notes… Amazing, the entire origin of the Fig Newton, right there in your hands;
• Do you have people aged 8 to 16 in your house? You’re welcome;
• There’s an economy of newsletters?;
• Canadian non-fiction preview for fall 2020: a veritable glut;

A letter from Poetry to its readers lays the situation bare: there will be no September issue (the first missed issue ever) so they can concentrate on “reckoning with the deep-seated white supremacy of our organization.” That’s a very hard decision-to-make/thing-to-say and a very responsible one. Good work and good luck, Poetry!

This September, Poetry is breaking from its legacy of continuous publication and will not print a monthly issue for the first time since its founding by Harriet Monroe in 1912.

Magazine staff made this decision to put people before production. We are acting in part out of necessity, and in majority out of respect to our community, poets, and staff. The manifold violence of our world demands more from us. The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine must be agents of antiracism to build a more loving, supportive, and inclusive community.

We cannot escape Poetry’s history, which we have exalted and continue to profit from. We are committed to understanding that history better in order to dismantle its structures and reparate the magazine’s debt to Black people, Indigenous people, other people of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, disabled people, and other marginalized groups of people who have been exploited, sidelined, and tokenized in support of white dominant culture. This pause is a necessary part of Poetry magazine’s reckoning with the deep-seated white supremacy of our organization. 

So, imagine my horror yesterday evening when I realized it was not in fact Friday at all, but a meagre, mocking Thursday, and I was forbidden by my own declarations-of-need-for-more-restraint from drinking an entire six pack of beer. But I have consulted with the horologists and they assure me that, yes, today IS “Friday, bitches,” as my friend Shannon says. Have at it, weekenders.

• Legendary kids book publisher Annick Press is being acquired by my publisher ECW;
• Trends in book cover art;
• Knausgaardashian;
• JK Rowling gets petulant and returns Human Rights Award she obviously never actually deserved;
• Powell’s is dropping off Amazon;
• Ian Williams profile;
• How to donate books during Covid;
• 7-year-old on writing during the pandemic;
• You got any of these books hanging around? You could be richer than you thought — which for me is: able to buy lunch;
• Indie Bookstore Day adjustments for Covid;
• How metadata can support marketing;
• You will be mine, oh yes, you will be mine: German library finally gets the book they want 400 years later (for 2.5m pounds, no less);

It’s a lot of work to do more than talk, so here’s hoping it takes. Publishers’ Weekly looks at what’s afoot.

Diverse agents and editors as well as open-minded allies are key, Dennis-Benn noted, recalling that her debut novel, Here Comes the Sun (Liveright, 2016), was “a hard sell” due to its exploration of race, class, and sexuality in a Jamaican setting. “”If there’d been more Black people at the houses who ‘got’ my work, it would have been easier,” she noted, giving a shout out to her publicist, Michael Taeckens of an eponymous marketing and publicity firm, who is white.

Brooks confirmed points made by the other speakers, noting that the Association of Authors Representatives is trying to nurture young agents who are BIPOC, since agents “are the gatekeepers” to what gets published – and what does not. She pointed out that it can be difficult for people from diverse backgrounds to become agents, as access to New York City publishers is essential. Working on a commission basis can also be a deterrent to becoming an agent, amplified when the work of authors who are BIPOC “is devalued” because it often is not properly positioned in the marketplace.

See what I did there? My wit is lost on you people, I swear. An examination of how Anton got it on like Donkey Kong, and the legacy that created.

Chekhov is hardly a writer’s writer, but it might be said that short story writers believe, correctly or not, that they alone understand his true value. Carver is one of many who have learned the lessons Chekhov’s work teaches. On the cover of my copy of Carver’s Elephant (1988) a review quote describes him as “the American Chekhov”. “Errand”, the last story in the book and the last Carver saw published in his lifetime, describes Chekhov’s death. But the more important connection is his distinctively Chekhovian manner of dispersing meaning into apparently irrelevant details, and the pronounced open-endedness of his stories. Carver, however, was not the only American Chekhov: by the 1980s the appellation was threadbare with use. Addressing Cornell University’s Chekhov Festival in 1976, John Cheever told his audience he was “one of perhaps ten American writers who are known as the American Chekhov”.

The description isn’t unhelpful because it’s used carelessly, but because Chekhov’s influence is so widespread: most short story writers are Chekhovians, whether they realise it or not. Playwrights, too: asked about his influences Tennessee Williams replied, “Chekhov! As a dramatist? Chekhov! As a story writer? Chekhov!” Keeping to the short story in English, early disciples included Katherine Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, and from here his influence quickly ramifies: AE Coppard, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Yiyun Li and Joyce Carol Oates, who rewrote him with her “Lady with the Pet Dog”. This is only a sampling.

You made it again. You slogged through the flaming bag of shit that is reality for another week and now you get two days to forget the the bag, the shit, and the fire by meditating on what’s important in existence, creating new art and new thought, testing the limits of your physical endurance for something other than sitting in a chair, or simply self-medicating into a state of witless catatonia. No judgement, folks. Your call. Go nuts.

• How Covid created an avalanche of books for Sept;
• Liberation Library focusing on prison abolition;
• The NBCC is basically a cauldron of poisoned lava;
• Celebrate Indie Bookstore Day with these virtual events, or, you know, buy something;
• Stop ruining your books by taking them off the shelves;
• RIP: Eugene McCabe, playwright, dead at 90;
• America is a fucking shitshow: storm over library supporting BLM leads to more hate;
• El Wattpado con PRH;
• Margaret Atwood writes about her late partner Graeme Gibson;
• Awards season is in full swing:
  • Journey Prize shortlist is up, includes Ninja pal Lisa Foad;
  • Dutch author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld wins International Booker;
  • Finalists for National Business Book awards;
• Don’t piss off a librarian, Boris Johnson, you twit;
• Time to face the music on your overdue library books;
• Lithub gives us a heads-up: the Ursula LeGuin doc is streaming free;
• Ever been gifted a book that you hate?;

• The Women’s Prize is going digital and ticketed;
• There will be multiple digital platforms for agents and exhibitors at Frankfurt this year;
• Teachers pen kids book about back-to-school in a time of Covid;
• Kuwait relaxes censorship laws;
• How to care for your books;
• Amazon restricts who can review the Prince Harry/Meghan Markle book on their site due to “suspicious activity”;
• How to disinfect books from the library, Howard Hughes;
• Amazon cancels Iain Banks Culture series adaptation due to “timing”;
• RIP: Gail Sheehy, journalist and author, dead at 83;
• Audible squinting into distance: “Who is that rider on the horizon? OMG, it’s Spotify! LOWER THE DAMN PRICES!!!!”;
• Postcards as a literary genre;
• On the effort to save the Urdu language in India;
• Little bit of midweek fun: Are you familiar with “AITA?” on reddit? People outline a problem and ask if they’re the ones being an asshole or not… Can you guess which books these fake “Am I The Asshole?” posts are referring to?;

Lapham’s takes a deep dive into the life and work of William McGonagall, the worst poet to ever live (though I could line up a few challengers for him), and his penchant for disaster.

Scotland has justifiably claimed him as its own, but in all likelihood McGonagall was born in Ireland, in 1825. His family migrated to Dundee when William was a child, and like much of the city’s population, he grew up to be a weaver. The textile business was booming then, though the apogee of the mechanical revolution wasn’t far behind. And as the industry began to make workers redundant amid its collapse in 1877, McGonagall had a conveniently timed epiphany. Sitting in his room on a spring day, he recalls, “I seemed to feel as it were a strange kind of feeling stealing over me…I imagined that a pen was in my right hand, and a voice crying, ‘Write! Write!’” He complied, writing a graceless tribute to the Scottish preacher George Gilfillan (himself a poet, although the misfortune of having been eulogized by his fellow Dundonian has been the better part of his literary legacy). McGonagall sent the results to Dundee’s Weekly News, where they were subsequently published by a deeply bemused editorial staff.

What followed over the next two and a half decades was one of the most bizarre careers in Victorian letters. The Weekly News proved a reliable publisher, though it often accompanied McGonagall’s hapless texts with scathingly ironic commentary (a courtesy they were not inclined to extend to their more traditional poetic contributors). Encouraged by what he misconstrued to be rightful artistic recognition, the poet took to local theaters to read his own works and recite Shakespearean soliloquies, whereupon he was often met with raucous crowds who either mockingly encouraged him—sometimes carrying him aloft into the streets—or pelted him with garbage. (Contemporary accounts allege that among the objects he was barraged with were potatoes, footwear, rotten eggs, fish, sacks of soot, peas, snowballs, and, on at least one occasion, a brick.) His profile rising amid these riotous performances, McGonagall increasingly became the victim of a number of cruel pranks, which only served to inflate his own sense of vocational destiny. He trekked to Balmoral Castle seeking an audience with Queen Victoria after someone had passed him a sham letter of patronage; he was tricked into dining with an imposter posing as the dramatist Dion Boucicault; and in the last years of his life, McGonagall was made a knight of the fictional “Holy Order of the White Elephant,” an honor supposedly bestowed upon him by the king of Burma, and of which he proudly and obliviously boasted until his death.