Show & Tell: A Lot About Musicals
Unstacked Digest for the week of May 20-26
Welcome to another edition of Show & Tell where I tell you the nine things I loved from the week and the one thing I hated, plus round up everything else going on around these parts. The first half of Show & Tell is free to all. The adoration and hateration are for paid subscribers only.
It was a busy week for me. The Stacks launched a new website, I made a whole ass 35-book Nonfiction Reading Guide, and my friends
and joined me to talk about the best books of the year, so far. If you missed any of that and you’re sad about it, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription around here. It allows me to do the work I do, like make the guide in six days, and also gets you access to everything I have to offer. Plus you’ll get to read me talk shit about another thing at the end of this Show & Tell. Everybody wins.
This Week on Unstacked
I told you all about a chance encounter from one of my Roman Empires. Truly life altering.
My Nonfiction Reading Guide aka NRG is here and it is filled with 35 books I love and think are totally unputdownable.
My fave book people,
& , are back to talk with me about the best books of the year, so far.
R. O. Kwon, the author of the brand new Exhibit, joined me for another round of RTKB to talk punctuation and her ideal reader.
If you’ve got the NRG then join us tomorrow, Tuesday May 28th at 5pm PT for a meetup to talk all things reading guide. I’ll share insights and answer questions!
Books I Read This Week
Oye by Melissa Mogollon
This is unlike anything I’ve read before. The entire book is told through one-sided phone calls of 18-year-old Luciana to her sister Mari who is off at college. It is an intergenerational family tragicomedy. It is voicey, and I don’t mean that as a pejorative, I love voicey. I think the book could’ve ben shorter given the constraints, but I had fun with it, and thought the audio was pretty entertaining.
Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi
Oh boy, this is a fucked up little book. It is super readable, but only if you want to read some dark shit. Trigger warnings? Most of them. I liked it, but felt the pacing was off a bit in the middle which led to me seeing the ending coming from about 100 pages away. I thought it was a dark twisty book that I kept me entertained. And for Emezi’s first foray into the land of thrillers it worked for me, even if it wasn’t as inventive as I had hoped. I know folks will be talking about this one. It has the potential to be super polarizing.
Fave of the week!
Housekeeping
The Stacks has a brand new website. It looks nice and is super functional. You can search for all episodes of the show, find upcoming events, past podcast appearances, and much more. Check it out!
The great Christian Dueñas, editor of The Stacks, is a real life podcast professional when he isn’t moonlighting with me. This week he launched a new podcast called Primer, it is all about music and translation. Each season, with a co-host, Christian explores a genre of music from outside the English-speaking world. The debut season features Japanese City Pop. Go give it a listen.
This month for my Voter Literacy, with Traci column on Shereads.com I shared a whole bunch of books I love on mass incarceration.
Nine Things I Love…
Book News
This week we saw two surprising firings in publishing land. Lisa Lucas, the publisher at Pantheon, and Reagan Arthur, who was heading up Alfred K. Knopf, both lost their jobs this week. Both of these women came into their roles in 2020, for different reasons.
For Arthur, it was after the death of Sonny Mehta, who had led Knopf for decades.
For Lucas, it was in response to the “racial reckoning” of 2020.
Now Penguin Random House is saying they are restructuring, or whatever. What sticks out to me about all of this is that generally, it takes 5 or so years (at minimum) to see a publishers impact on their imprint. So these firings feel premature.
In the case of Lucas, I feel like she was set up a bit. We’ve seen this time and again, give a Black woman a job because your org needs to look like it’s not racist (though in this case Pantheon had never had a Black publisher in its 80+ year history), but then do not give her the time or mentorship to get the job done. Lucas came into the role as an outsider to publishing (though she worked in the book space as the director of the National Book Foundation). It takes more than 3.5 years to learn an industry at the highest level, let alone thrive in it. But truly, Lucas seemed to be doing a good enough job. She’s the reason National Book Award finalist Chain-Gang All-Stars ended up at Pantheon (according to the author). She also just signed a two book deal with Levar Burton, yes the Levar Burton.
So while I’d like to believe this is all about money, or whatever, it feels very much like it is about other things. Things like racism. And before you say, something about Arthur also losing her job. Yes, I know. I think she is just a casualty of the Lucas firing. Firing Lucas alone feels like extremely bad PR. But, that is FULLY CONJECTURE and me having a bad attitude.
If you want to read more about this check out this NYT piece.
Pop Culture
I’m late, but I started season three of Hacks and I’m thrilled to be back on this show. It is funny and smart and good but also not too heavy of a lift mentally.