The Stacks Pairings: April 2024

From poetry and place to chesty anti-heroes, what to read after you listen to The Stacks this month.

Apr 29, 2024

Every month I’m sharing book pairings for The Stacks episodes. It will feature the books we covered on the podcast for the month matched to two books I think go nicely with them. So if you loved the episode, loved the author, or loved the book, you will have a few more books to add to your TBR!

Hala Alyan on The Stacks

Hala Alyan was our guest to kick off national poetry month. We talked about her new collection, The Moon That Turns You Back, and poetry more broadly and also Hala has the most unique reading snack in the six plus years of the podcast.

Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd
A collection of poems about the authors grandmother and the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire edited by Jennifer Bing, Mike Merryman-Lotze, & Jehad Abusalim
I love the idea of a collection of writers and poets speaking on a place and time, and think that Hala’s unique experiences as being Palestinian and having grown up all over the world adds to the conversation already in this book.

Andre Boryga on The Stacks

Debut author and journalist

Andrew Boryga

came on the podcast to talk about his satirical novel Victim and the ways he sees that book in conversation with a much larger conversation about trauma porn and representation.

Yelloface by R. F. Kuang
This novel flips Victim on its head. Instead of a person of color exaggerating their own traumas for profit, we get a white woman stealing the work of a (dead) author of color to huge success. These books are fully in conversation.

Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour
This is another satirical novel following a chesty young man as he navigates a predominately white space. The details differ, but the energy and ridiculousness feel similar.

Keith O’Brien on The Stacks

I fell in love with Charlie Hustle by Keith O’Brien. It is about one of baseball’s great anti-hero’s but it also is just a fantastic work of storytelling. I got to talk with O’Brien not just about Pete Rose, but also cheating scandals, race in baseball, and of course, the great hall of fame debate.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City by Jonathan Mahler
A fantastic book about a moment in baseball history deserves another fantastic book about a moment in baseball history. The Yankees. Politics. Crime. New York City. This book has it all.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
No, Pete Rose and Elizabeth Holmes are not on the same level of awful when it comes to their crimes and their impact. However, these two books really have the same energy. They are deeply researched propulsive narratives about a couple of assholes.

The Stacks Book Club on The January Children

Hala Alyan joined us at the end of the month for a book club discussion of the poetry collection The January Children by Safia Elhillo. We talked a lot about what we loved in this collection and how Elhillo writes about the in betweens of culture, place, and time.

If They Come for Us by Fatimah Asghar
This poetry collection is about the experiences of being a young Pakistani woman in America. It captures the same in between feelings that Elhillo gets at in her work.

This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets edited by Kwame Alexander
I love thinking of Elhillo as a part of the conversations in this book from a range of contemporary Black poets. Elhillo was born in Maryland and writes often of The Sudan where her people are from and that tension is so common to Black folks. Not the specifics of it but the tension at the heart of it.

What books would you pair with this month’s episodes of The Stacks? Tell me in the comments.

Unstacked

Discussion about this post