Show & Tell: Tennis Fits, PEN America, and Green Bean Power Rankings
Unstacked Digest for the week of April 22 -28
Saturday marked Indie Bookstore Day and I got to celebrate by being a guest bookseller at my favorite indie bookstore, Reparations Club. Not to be too sappy, but I love indies so much and am so grateful for all the do for our communities and the literary world. I love that this day exists and am so glad I got to take a small break from the horrors of the world for be in community with my fellow book lovers. I hope you got to celebrate in some way.
And for folks who don’t know, you can support your favorite indies online all year long by buying your physical books through bookshop.org and getting audiobooks from libro.fm. Both retailers allow you to pick an indie bookstore that will receive a portion of your purchase every time you buy. Same great books but zero dollars to Bezos, everyone wins (but Bezos).
This Week on Unstacked
We did a little Show & Tell around Bookchella.
I fell in love with
with this RTKB. The way she writes about joy in writing really warmed my heart.Books I Read This Week
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
I wanted more from this book. It does exactly what you think it will (recounts the events, shares the recovery process, gives a few musings on life, and heaps praise on his partner) but no more. There is a lack of connection between Rushdie and the reader and so the book feels perfunctory instead of revelatory.
Woke Up No Light by Leila Mottley
This collection on home, girlhood, and the history of Black violence is strong in places, spotty in others, and generally has too much packed in. I liked poems throughout but wish it had been shorter or attempted less so that I could really resonate with the poems as a whole and in their own.
Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace
I was really taken by this book, the writing is beautiful but the level of trust Wallace shows his reader is in and of itself proof of the other ways we can love. So far a memoir of the year for me.
Fave of the week!
Housekeeping
This week was The Stacks Book Club episode with Hala Alyan, where we discuss the poetry collection The January Children by Safia Elhillo. We talk about how poems work generally and the specifics of this collection.
Angelenos, I’m talking to Leila Mottley about her new poetry collection Woke Up No Light on April 30th. Get all the details here, and come hang out with us!
My live show, One for the Books is back! May 15th with author Amanda Montell (Cultish, The Age of Magical Overthinking) and actor Vella Lovell (Animal Control, My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) it all goes down.
Nine Things I Love…
Book News
PEN America has absolutely lost their way. Early last week they announced they would be canceling their award ceremony after many authors pulled out due to PEN’s continued mishandling of the situation in Gaza. Then on Friday they announced they’d also be canceling their World Voices Festival. They released this petulant statement to go along with the festival’s cancelation.
I do think canceling both events if the right and correct thing to do. No business as usual while there is a genocide going on.
My big issue with PEN right now is that they are so far afield from their values they can’t even see it. They have doubled down. They are making authors the enemy here. The same authors that they ostensibly value, since they are the authors they’ve included in their events and wish to honor with their awards. It would be one thing if Ben Shapiro was calling on PEN do something, but it is not outside authors and agitators. It is the very authors that PEN says it supports, respects, and wants to be in community with. To me, that is the biggest hypocrisy of all of this. Aside from the fact that PEN says they don’t want authors voices to be silenced and there is genocide going on which is of course the ultimate silencing of voices.
I found this piece from The Atlantic to do a good job of laying out what is going on and the many back and forths between the organization and the authors. I do not come down in the same place as the author of the piece, but it is helpful to see it all in one place.
Pop Culture
Zendaya’s outfits from this Challengers press tour is the greatest. I know Margo Robbie did this same thing for Barbie, but I’ll be honest, I do not fuck with Margo Robbie in the same way I fuck with Oakalnd’s own Zendaya. The whole thing is so joyful and cheeky. Also, who doesn’t love tennis fashions? I will refrain on commenting on the appearances of the two young men she costarred with, because they were, to put it mildly, not serving (see what I did there).
I am told by
and others that the movie is also good. I will get there when I get there.