i'm bringing paperback (yeah)
+ wrote about the iconic Dionne Brand (!) and Sarah Schulman(!) noticed
Hiiiii I just got back to Brooklyn. Is it just me or does air travel these days feel like microdosing social collapse?? This past week, I spoke at the glorious Sun Valley Writer’s Conference. I also went fly fishing for the first time. I caught (and released) three fish and discovered I was not above an “idaho? youdaho” joke. :(
Also, did you know that Idaho is insanely beautiful??? I did not.
ATCBD PAPERBACK
Truly, my brain refuses to believe that it’s been a year, but the 🥺PAPERBACK🥺 of All This Could Be Different comes out next week. I’d love to see you and say hi in person! So far, my tour is taking me to Brooklyn (Tuesday 8/1), DC(Wednesday 8/2), Atlanta (Thursday 8/3) and Milwaukee (Wednesday 9/20). We might add a few more cities over the coming weeks / months. Details below, please come and bring your friends…I’m a little nervous about attendance at the DC and Atlanta events.
And if you’ve liked, loved, bought, borrowed, recommended, reviewed, or in any other way helped, this book—know that I’ll never stop being grateful.
While I have you, here’s some brief history of the paperback. In 1935, Allen Lane, the chairman of UK publishing house Bodley Head, was on a train platform, stresst about how to keep the business afloat given the lousy economy. At this time, a hardback book cost the same amount as a full tank of gas — it approached a luxury item that many did without.
Lane wanted to find something to read on his train journey. He wandered around the platform and only found magazines, smutty “penny dreadfuls,” and cigarette packs. This made him wonder: what if a book cost as much as a pack of cigs? What if quality books were available at prices the common man could afford, at places the common man frequented?
Bodley Head, his publishing house, didn’t think much of the idea. So Allen Lane self-financed, creating a new house named Penguin. Until the Penguin paperbacks, high-production, well-written books printed in ink that did not stain one's hands were available only in hardcover. Across the Atlantic, U.S.-based Pocket Books followed suit in 1938, printing Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth as the first American paperback.
Allen Lane was a strange, mercurial man (nasty to employees, demanded ingratiation, once had four girlfriends all named Phyllis), but he had some principles. He believed in the “existence…of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price” and went after it. I’m glad he did. And I’m happy (and very lucky) that my book will be available more widely and accessibly.
WROTE ABOUT ONE OF MY FAVORITE POETS, PRINT AND ONLINE
I’ve been writing more shortform stuff alongside Mx. Novel #2 and I hope to share it with you periodically. Here’s a feature on the great poet Dionne Brand for Lux Magazine. Dionne is fascinating and important to me — an immigrant, visionary, worker, revolutionary in Grenada, and much more. My essay, which delves into socialist history, the uses of poetry, and a tracing of Dionne’s life, was only available in print and for subscribers, but has since been unpaywalled. Here’s how it begins:
More later,
xx
STM
By the way, I wish I could make it to your Politics and Prose reading tonight here in DC, but I'm recovering from some oral surgery so I'm laying low. I hope you have a great reading and I hope to catch you next time!
Any possibility of you making a detour to Avid Bookshop in Athens, GA, after your talk in ATL? It’s hard to make the drive on a school night, and I’ve told all my friends who read that yours is the best book I’ve read all year. Some have even listened. Please?