Mithuns in Princeton; Venezuela; Paul Loeb’s new book

Dear friends of Blue Ear Books,

This newsletter is a companion to our book-publishing enterprise; I think of it as - at least aspirationally - a 21st-century digital version of a literary periodical. As such, it’s meant to be a hospitable home to Blue Ear Books authors and readers.

Currently, our commitment to this newsletter is to try to publish a fresh piece by one of our authors once a week, every Friday. That rhythm has been disrupted by the holiday season, but we’re planning to get back to it, and perhaps to post even more frequently as well as creatively. Watch this space!

For now, this note is to alert you to three projects you’ll soon be hearing more about:

1. Edith Mirante, author of a wonderful book Blue Ear Books published in November, Where the Mithuns Are: Essays on War, Art and Beasts (as well as of the classic travel book Burmese Looking Glass and two other books), will be doing an in-person event at the terrific Princeton Public Library in Princeton, New Jersey, next Thursday, January 15, at 6:30 pm. If you’re in Princeton, I hope you’ll attend! If you’re not, you can attend the livestream, as I’m planning to do. Many thanks as always to my good friend Janie Hermann of the PPL. Read Edith’s recent piece for this Substack.

2. Don Macleay, with whom I’m working on a memoir of living in Nicaragua during the 1980s, is at work on a piece for this Substack contextualizing recent events in Venezuela. You’ll be hearing more about this - and reading the piece itself - soon. Jonathan Garfunkel’s excellent essay “‘Never again is now’: When remembering becomes a political act,” published on this Substack in March 2025, offers a model for how we hope to respond to breaking world events with Don’s piece (and others to come).

3. In addition to the usual holiday season commitments and related stresses and distractions that most of us deal with every year in November and December, I’ve lately been busy helping my friend Paul Rogat Loeb prepare a revised third edition of his bestselling book The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear. The new edition will be published later this year by Basic Books. Meanwhile, I invite you to subscribe to Paul’s own Substack.

   Paul Loeb has been a good personal friend since I first moved to Seattle in 2006 - twenty years ago! - and, for even longer than that, I’ve admired him as a brave and humane public writer and as an intellectual and professional role model. I’m deeply honored that he saw fit to hire me to help him with the new edition of his important book. The second edition was published way back in 2014, light years ago in American political terms. The new edition is boldly revised for the time we’re now living through, with forthright new framing essays freshly written by Paul (and edited by me and a couple of other trusted colleagues). It also will include, at Paul’s request, a short excerpt from the updated edition of Christo Brand’s book Doing Life with Mandela: My Prisoner, My Friend, which was updated with new material by Andrew Russell and published by Blue Ear Books in 2022.

My very best to everyone for the new year, and heartfelt thanks to you for being part of the Blue Ear Books community.

Ethan

Publisher, Blue Ear Books