Bethanne Dives Into BookStackOur Book Columnist Browses Her Favorite 'Stacks. Plus: Reads or the Week!
Dear Wags, Like Hamish McKenzie says when we’re hanging out, reimagining media, to give good Substack, you gotta know good Substack. Before I plunge into the week’s recs, here is a smattering of my favorite newsletters covering publishing and more: PUBLISHING CONFIDENTIAL is the brainchild of Kathleen Schmidt, an MBA with PR experience at Big Five publishers. She provides great insights into what’s working—and what’s going off the rails—in the industry. Friday Book Therapy posts nurture a growing community of fans. BEFORE AND AFTER THE BOOK DEAL from Courtney Maum is a hub for those navigating the nightmarish publishing process. Maum’s Book Building with Savanah takes you through every step of crafting a memoir, from developing an idea through outlines, drafts, edits, and promotion. CRAFT TALK. Bestselling novelist Jami Attenberg (see below) has built a welcoming community featuring author interviews, travel tips, and productive advice on how to juice creativity. Attenberg is there to cheer even the most flummoxed writer on. Oh, and there will be crafting. EVERYTHING IS PERSONAL is author Laurie Stone’s engaging look at her life and the world that surrounds it. Her publication mixes fiction, memoir, criticism, and social commentary seamlessly. It’s a great cocktail—drink it in. OLDSTER MAGAZINE from Sari Botton is a cracking read aimed at readers of a certain age (don’t narrow it down more than that). So far, her newsletter has featured wunderkinder from 40 to 100. Thanks to sparky Q&As such as Ask the East Village Yenta, this read never gets old. Yours Ever, BKP
The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk Tokarczuk won raves for a murder mystery (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead) and a sprawling epic about messianic Jews (The Books of Jakob). Now she’s back with a loopy horror story set at a health clinic. Not since T.C. Boyle’s The Road to Wellville have we been on such a weird foray into a sanitorium (the deeper inspiration here is Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain). On the eve of World War I, Wojnicz, a young Pole with tuberculosis, takes the cure at a Silesian spa where the regime includes psychedelics. What happens next isn’t so restful, but Nurse Ratched might approve.
The Repeat Room by Jesse Ball Ball is also a fine poet, but it’s his inventive novels that seem to hook readers. This one is set in a dystopia where citizens have access to an accused person’s mind during a trial. When Abel Cotter is assigned to judge the fate of a teenager, he’s flying blind—the totalitarian state never discloses the actual crimes defendants commit. Getting to the truth means running afoul of the system. We learn about the boy in question, we get a sense of the blind alleys that trap people in the real criminal justice system. Ball, who has been compared to Calvino and Borges, deftly uses fiction to unmask perversities in crime and punishment.
A Reason to See You Again by Jami Attenberg Attenberg (The Middlesteins) is a compassionate and wry chronicler of family dysfunction. We meet the Cohen family in 1971 and then follow them for 40 years as they struggle to make sense of their lives. Siblings Shelly and Nancy blaze different paths while their mother Frieda struggles after the death of her husband Rudy, the sun they all orbited. Culture and communication change (Shelly goes into tech, while Nancy is trapped in a bad marriage) but deeper ties prove unbreakable. ...  Unlock this post for free, courtesy of JD Heyman.
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