📖📚🎶🎞️ and chill

I’ve been meaning for a while to put together one of my periodic newsletter roundups—select updates from my reading life, mini reviews, little recs for books, essays, films, and for some reason a recipe. It’s below, paywalled for supporting subscribers of this newsletter.

• Last night I was in conversation with Malavika Kannan at McNally J’s for her lovely sold-out launch event for her debut Unprecedented Times. Unprecedented Times is a coming-of-rage campus novel set against the COVID-19 pandemic. It is sharp and funny and searching and earnest. It came out yesterday, and you can buy it here or at your local bookstore.

• September 3rd I’ll be reading some new stuff at a fundraiser put on by Tanvi Misra and Roshan Abraham to benefit the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, which supports writers in the West Bank and Gaza. 7 PM, Starr Bar, Brooklyn, NY. More details soon, but consider this a save-the-date.

• Alongside some other great and smart people, I helped produce this conversation between Hamilton Nolan, Rayne Fisher-Quann, and Katie Gatti Tassin last week. You can watch—or read the transcript of—State of the Substackers: Labor, Creators, and What’s Next here. Relatedly, if you are a writer or creator on Substack concerned about enshittification, slop, or the question of $$, drop your email here…we are cooking up some things for you—yes, you!

How do people earn a living on Substack? What does it mean to be a worker when you’re an independent “creator?” What could organizing look like in this weird, disparate media paradigm?

— Hamilton Nolan

I brought up in my email [to the group organizing this event] the Walter Benjamin line: “fascism sees its salvation in giving the masses the ability to express themselves in lieu of granting them their rights.” …I am the person in my family’s history with the most comically overpowered capacities of self-expression ever. The amount that I can make my individual voice heard and be compensated for it is unprecedented in my family’s history. And I am the first person in four generations who has not been able to join a union.

— Rayne Fisher-Quann

Here are some highly-anticipated-by-me books that I pre-ordered, and which you may want to as well: Isle McElroy’s Satellite, out Spring 2027. They read from it at my home earlier this summer and I was RAPT. I love novels about marriage. I’m hype for this one. Tanais’ Stellar Smoke sounds sick as hell; I really enjoyed their first novel and their award-winning nonfiction memoir, so I simply can’t wait for this. Mothers and daughters and AI and artmaking and ashrams and ghosts??? Hello???

I’m a fan of both Annie Lowrey’s first book and her economics journalism. As someone who is interested by the question of How Can Left Governments Do Good Shit Well AND as someone who has been Victimized By Bureaucracy, I smashed the pre-order button for her forthcoming The Time Tax, out Aug 22.

I’m also really anticipating Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming by Abdelrahman ElGendy. Huna is a memoir of his six years as a political prisoner in post-revolution Egypt, beginning at the tender age of seventeen. ElGendy recently had to flee the United States because of his activism on behalf of the Palestinian people, thus becoming exiled twice over.

I read chaotically most of the time. I’m somewhere in the middle of (send a wave if you are as well): Peter Weiss’ The Aesthetics of Resistance (incredible but I am going through it at a molasses pace). Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and The Making of the Third World by Mike Davis. Byung-Chul Han’s Psychopolitics. Arya Burke’s poem collection Revenant Walk. Leah Abrams’ Dated, not out but available for pre-order—almost done with this, it’s really good so far!! Maggie Millner’s startling, beautiful My Funeral, out next year.

If you’ve supported the newsletter in the past and had to cut back, but want to read these or the essay coming soon, feel free to reply to this email and let me know, happy to comp you for a bit.

I just finished this wonderful new horned-up-but-mystical short story by Sheila Heti. The narrator, partnered herself, longs for a spoken-for man named, of all things, Pier. It’s very funny and memorable…a story about lust that expands into an inquiry into why wanting is so often more vivid and more haunting than having. Also I like when God is a supporting character in fiction. Taking notes.

It was a gift from God, this desire—which was now a memory of desire. But a memory of desire is desire, and it kept coming back to her over the years; Pier. They did run into each other again—seven times! And each time the same excitement was there, and each time they did nothing: treated each other like they treated everyone else in the room, although something very special was hanging between them. But they pretended there was nothing special between them, but she knew there was. It had turned on at that New Year’s party, and it never turned off.

— Sheila Heti, Earthly Delights