Show & Tell: Stuffed Shells, The Oscars, and Magical Negroes.
Unstacked Digest for the week of March 4-10
Well first things first, this week I launched a whole ass substack. Please clap. Also give yourselves a hand for being here.
I was going to call this weekly round up something boring like “Unstacked Weekly Roundup” but then the genius Minda Honey referred to these lists as “Grown Up Show and Tell” and now, here we are. Thanks
! While we’re here, Minda wrote a dope ass memoir last year called The Heartbreak Years you should read it.Here is the plan for Show & Tell
I’ll hit you with a quick summary of whatever is new at Unstacked, what books I finished, plus any other housekeeping. Then I’ll give you 10 things from my week. Nine will be things I loved from a group of static categories (book news, food, pop culture, etc.) and the tenth thing will be a thing I hate. As a grade A hater, this feels right. I love to champion a thing I love, but I also love to wholeheartedly talk shit about a thing I hate.
Sound good? Let’s go.
This Week on Unstacked
I launched this whole ass substack, again, please clap. If you missed it here is the announcement/welcome post to get a sense for what we’re doing here.
The first Tuesday of the month I share my most anticipated books of the month list. Here is March.
Also I need help finding leafy green veggies I want to eat. So please if you’re a vegetable person (how is that even a thing) help me out!
Out from the archive is an episode of The Stacks Unabridged with
from 2021. We talk about her shop Big Night, snacks, and the art of hosting. Katherine has a book coming out in June, Big Night: Dinners, Parties & Dinner Parties, you can preorder it here.
Every Friday I’ll be dropping the Read to Know Basis series which features an author talking about their new book, their writing life, and whatever they would bring to a literary potluck. This week I was joined by
to discuss her debut A Fire So Wild. read it here.Books I Read This Week
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
This is The Stacks Book Club pick for March and I get why it won the National Book Award. It is formally interesting, unique in tone, and is asking all the right questions about American-ness and assimilation.
Fave of the week!
School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education by Laura Pappano
I liked what this book started to do, but felt the scope was too narrow. It should’ve been called White School Moms. Politics in public schools is not exclusively about white or straight or heterosexual or suburban parents. I wish Pappano talked about the rest of us.
Watch Where They Hide by Tamron Hall
A mystery novel about a reporter who is better at solving crimes than the police (which, duh). It was fine, but it was doing too much. Like, I don’t think this kick ass Black news lady needs to be looking for love and feeling bad for herself because she’s single.
Selling the Dream: The Billion-Dollar Industry Bankrupting Americans by Jane Marie
This is a solid fast read about MLM’s. I’m a little versed in MLMs, I listened to some of Marie’s podcast The Dream and I also have watched a few MLM related documentaries. I can’t say for sure if I felt like anything in this book was new to me, but I still enjoyed my time with it as a general overview on the history of MLMs.
The Moon That Turns You Back by Hala Alyan
I am not a poetry girlie, but I enjoyed this collection to the best of my abilities. Alyan plays a lot with form and that kept the poems fresh and easy to differentiate. As far as themes, this collection focuses on family legacy, home, and grief.
Housekeeping
I do a monthly book spot on NPR’s Here and Now, and I talked about Black genre fiction.
This week on The Stacks I talked to
author of the book Flawless.Nine Things I Love…
Book News
On Monday, March 4th, ShopQueer.co announced they were now Allstora Books. This came out to much fanfare (including a little moment in the NYT) because of their claims to double author profits and be a place that champions the voices of underrepresented groups. Almost instantly people on social media started to note that they weren’t a bookstore to celebrate queer and diverse voices, as they claim, but merely a dropshipping bookseller selling whatever is available through their distributor. This basically means books that are explicitly racist, homophobic, transphobic, and the like are also for sale at Allstora. Which, is not great. It gives big “Republicans buy sneakers, too” vibes. On top of that not great stuff, the membership business model, and promises to pay authors more remains unclear. This piece in Vulture explains it all. I don’t know how this will all shake out but I do plan to keep a close eye on it.
Also, of note, is this phenomenal takedown of RuPaul’s new memoir The House of Hidden Meanings by none other than the brilliant,
.Pop Culture
The Oscar’s were last night, and the awards were mostly what was predicted, and they were mostly white, and they were mostly uneventful. But, I loved this chat with the Unstacked community where we talked about the Oscars in real time. Oscar night is one of my favorite nights of the year, even though it is arguably one of the worst award shows, and it was made much better getting to share in it with all of you. I think we will try more live chats, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out.
Shout out to the director of The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer, who said in his acceptance speech for best international film, “Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” A spot on refrain from the director of a film about culpability in the face of genocide.
Aside from Glazer, and the director of the winner for best documentary feature, 20 Days in Mariupol, this award show was eerily quiet when it came to politics. That felt especially conspicuous given all that is going on globally, not to mention the recent labor strikes in Hollywood, and the upcoming US elections, and the recent attacks on IVF, and the banning of books, and the attacks on trans children, and, and, and. You can usually count on at least one A-lister saying something mildly political, but this year’s Oscars were a huge miss in the artists speaking truth to power department.
Last thing on the Oscar’s because it has a book world tie in. I couldn’t help but laugh at Cord Jefferson winning best adapted screenplay for American Fiction because one of the last movies to win that award with a Black screenwriter was Precious, which was adapted from the novel Push, which is one of the books Percival Everett eviscerates in his book Erasure, which is of course, the text that was adapted to make American Fiction. We call that synergy, baby. Thanks to the Academy.