"Writers are you and me and everyone we know."

Since last we spoke—

—My Congressional testimony was also covered by Paste and Chronogram.

—Band People is reviewed in the new issue of the British Sociological Association’s journal Work, Employment and Society: “a qualitatively rich book…a thoroughly theorised sociological account [which] makes a substantive contribution to the literature on aesthetic labour, and work in the music industry more generally. It is a fascinating text that will be of interest not only to those interested in the production of music and culture, but to scholars of work and organisation.”

—The Hold Steady is headed to Chicago for a big weekend of shows, as we continue to celebrate twenty years of Boys and Girls in America:

June 11 @ Thalia Hall, Chicago IL (Storytellers Set)

June 12 @ Empty Bottle, Chicago IL

June 13 @ Salt Shed, Chicago IL (w/ Built To Spill, Bully, Titus Andronicus)

I’ll have a more substantive post next time, but forgive me if you will for engaging in a bit of logrolling. When I was working on my first book I had a community of musicians, but not, for the most part, writers—the only person I knew, at that point, who seemed to be moving beyond “aspiring” was Rebecca Schiff, whose first book was about to come out. I told her I wished I felt like I had a cohort of writers. She grimaced a little and said I was better off, that writers weren’t that fun. (For more on that topic, see her recent McSweeney’s piece “Writers.”)

All of which is to say it’s been a great year for books by friends and colleagues; and to recognize that I was having that feeling, ten or fifteen years later, that I’d been looking for.

So if you’re looking for something to read, why not check out one of them? When We’re Born We Forget Everything is poet and musician (and, I believe, newly-minted rabbi) Alicia Jo Rabins’ memoir of a journey towards faith; This Is The Door is Darcey Steinke’s meditation on faith and pain. Ben Hale’s Cave Mountain and Isaac Fitzgerald’s American Rambler are discursive explorations of different flavors of what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk”—Hale’s of a family story of a child’s disappearance and its connection to a murderous low-level cult; Fitzgerald’s using Johnny Appleseed as an excuse to look for reasons for optimism about our ability to connect with each other. And Adam Wilson’s Fail Sons (a pair of grown brothers drive their father’s cryogenically preserved, but melting, corpse across the country) and Claire Carusillo’s The Responsible Party (bodies, shipwrecks, off-label beauty products)—both novels, both upcoming—play in the Sam Lipsyte tradition of glumly earnest, vaudevillian satire.

(Mike Huguenor’s debut Elvis Is Dead, I’m Still Alive—the story of Mike Park and Asian Man Records—deserves a place in this picture as well! But my copy is still in the mail.)

OK! More soon.

FN