Book Post

18/06/2024

How an "exemplar of Bavarian gnarliness" tolerates the embrace of a city that combines "the worst kind of corporate groupthink and ostentatious greed with frantic virtue signaling" Christian Caryl on Werner Herzog

When Werner Herzog was a toddler growing up in the Bavarian Alps in the last days of World War II, he was attacked by a witch …

17/06/2024

“I am filled with a deep reluctance against every form of cultural criticism,” begins Elias Canetti. This week’s Book Post Diary

The practice of cultural criticism is repulsive for many reasons.

09/06/2024

The Federal Writers Project: 1935 and today, this week's Book Post Notebook

What a Federal Writers Project did in the thirties, and what it could do now

02/06/2024

While quarantined in a Killarney hotel, Sarah Ruden developed an addiction to Barbara Pym. Today's Book Post Diary

How does she make stories about pointless hopes, game disappointments, and dull resolutions so absorbing?

01/06/2024

A bookselling hero!

A fire left Lucy Yu’s literary hub in Chinatown gutted. She was determined to rebuild it.

27/05/2024

Attacks on teaching and education deepen division, a new Book Post Notebook

A convergence of education policies have the effect of sorting us into ever-more-mutually isolated groups and undermining education's transformative power

22/05/2024

This looks so delightful! Rachel Cohen, whose book A Chance Meeting enchanted us, and coincidentally overlapped often with the life of Willa Cather, whose My Antonía we had just finished reading in our book group, is the inspiration for this lineup of conversation with a dazzling group of authors about literary encounters, via the Authors Guild. Beginning today

The Authors Guild Foundation is excited to present Chance Meetings, a new online literary seminar inspired by Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting, a dazzling group biography that offers a striking vision of the making and remaking of the American mind and […]

19/05/2024

New Book Post Diary: The cronicas of Chilean tr****ti pioneer Pedro Lemebel, in English for the first time

Bolaño wrote that Lemebel had a "tenderness, a sense of the apocalypse, fierce bitterness"

Here and there, in disguise or on the down-low, actors, painters, poets, and political groups would meet up after curfew to plan acts of sedition against the regime

15/05/2024

Comics, like humans, can't help repeating trauma, hoping for a better result, and that's funny. Michael Robbins on on Nancy, newly reassembled by The New York Review of Books Comics

From 1933 for a half century, a weekly comic strip about how you never know what’s going to happen or why

14/05/2024

Don't miss out on our typically smart and thoughtful takes! Sign up for Book Post at books.substack.com

12/05/2024

Yes people buy books but that doesn’t mean the system is working. Book Post ruminates on the greatly exaggerated and weirdly persistent rumor of the death of books

by Ann Kjellberg, editor Yes people buy books, but that doesn't mean the system is working

03/05/2024

Charles Graeber’s Review on a selection of books about altered states, L*D, and the US’s related Cold War experiments is open on Book Post now.

L*D, a psychoplastogen developed in the 1940s in Switzerland, arrived on the cusp great changes for humanity and the sciences.

01/05/2024

In celebration of the recent release of Nicholson Baker’s “Finding a Likeness” available now at our partner bookstore City Lights Booksellers & Publishers , we have opened 2 of Baker’s Book Sketches, on Colm Tóibín and Alain Corbin. Take a read!

Book Sketch is a new special Book Post feature for subscribers, in which author Nicholson Baker considers a book that has caught his interest with some quotations and a drawing.

30/04/2024

A new mystery from a writer who often refuses to finish the narrative puzzles he sets up and can be more interested in clues than their solutions, J. Robert Lennon’s Hard Girls is ripe with “pace and propulsion.” Our Review by Anthony Domestico is up now.

A new mystery from a writer who often refuses to finish the narrative puzzles he sets up and can be more interested in clues than their solutions

29/04/2024

"If today booksellers look to City Lights, which owes a large share of its intellectual identity to Paul Yamazaki, as a kind of fore-parent, it is partly for this example in staking out individual paths to representing and sharing the culture." - Ann Kjellberg

We are honored to have City Lights Booksellers & Publishers
as our partner bookstore until the end of the year! Enjoy a 3-month subscription to Book Post when you spend $100+ at City Lights during this time. And be sure to read Book Post Editor Ann Kjellberg's 2-part post on the history and importance of City Lights, open on Book Post now.

26/04/2024

The renowned novelist and the revered artist discuss their new book, a unique collaboration that explores the hidden history of the plant world. Pre-order your copy of An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children and get your free ticket now!

26/04/2024

Now in Book Post: Jamaica Kincaid, Entries from an Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children (image: Kara Walker)

C is for cotton (Gossypium), a member of the mallow family, which also includes okra, hollyhock, and cacao or cocoa. Cotton has been used to weave into clothing for thousands of years …

25/04/2024

Our newly opened Review by Allen Callahan on Temple Folk by Aaliyah Bilal & How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair, recent recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, praises the books as “nothing short of literary events.” Take a read on Book Post!

Two books about life in Black religious communities—Rastafarian and Nation of Islam—command attention both as literature and as windows into rarely seen worlds.

24/04/2024

“Lennon has made his name as a writer of strange, unclassifiable fiction, and what is most peculiar about Hard Girls is how unpeculiar it is. It’s a very good mainstream book by an author who has never really been mainstream.” Don’t miss our latest open Review on Substack, featuring Anthony Domestico on J. Robert Lennon.

A new mystery from a writer who often refuses to finish the narrative puzzles he sets up and can be more interested in clues than their solutions

22/04/2024

“The force of Ginsberg’s cry is undiluted,” writes Michael Robbins on Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, published by our latest partner bookstore City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in 1956. Read the Review here.

from Michael Robbins There is a photograph of a classroom at the Virginia Military Institute: The cadets sit in a row, all crew cuts and pressed gray uniforms. Their caps, bearing military insignia, rest before them on the desk. They are reading an assigned text for English class, each holding open....

21/04/2024

We are excited to announce our latest partner bookstore City Lights Booksellers & Publishers ! Don't miss Editor Ann Kjellberg's accompanying pieces open on Book Post now, illustrating the history and significance of City Lights further explored in Paul Yamazaki's latest book, Reading the Room: A Bookseller’s Tale, available May 8.

Founded at the heart of a literary movement in 1950s San Francisco, City Lights, in the loving care of Paul Yamazaki, remains a place of invention

16/04/2024

"Literature is a good sorting office," writes Anakana Schofield about the bracingly original way Zito Madu’s new memoir confronts and absorbs the pain and dislocation of the immigrant experience. Don't miss our latest Review, open on Book Post now!

"Literature is a good sorting office," writes Anakana Schofield about the bracingly original way this new memoir confronts and absorbs the pain and dislocation of the immigrant experience

13/04/2024

A learned reading by Michael Robbins of Marilynne Robinson reading Genesis, "a book about how lost we are and how little we know," in Bookforum

Marilynne Robinson goes back to the beginning – Michael Robbins

12/04/2024

As we wrap up this National Library Week, we invite readers to revisit our articles on the immense values of libraries and the heroes who keep them going.

https://books.substack.com/p/notebook-1-borrower-and-a-lender
https://books.substack.com/p/notebook-1-classroom-libraries
https://books.substack.com/p/notebook-infrastructure-part-one
https://books.substack.com/p/notebook-librarians-to-the-rescue
https://books.substack.com/p/notebook-local-control-part-i
https://books.substack.com/p/notebook-on-the-road-with-bookmobiles

11/04/2024

Poet Michael Hofmann on teaching literature in Florida, “where education goes to die"

We are a small part of a shrinking thing, tail to a dwindling dog, or that thing that, in Yeats, is fastened to the...

09/04/2024

The word “crossing” refers both to the act of meeting another’s path and the place where that happens. In our vehicularized modernity, crossings have proven particularly unfair to wild animals.

Don’t miss our latest Review on Ben Goldfarb’s Crossings, open on Book Post now.

The word “crossing” refers both to the act of meeting another’s path and the place where that happens. In our vehicularized modernity, crossings have proven particularly unfair to wild animals.

07/04/2024

A pack horse librarian delivering books in rural Kentucky in 1938. During the Great Depression, the Pack Horse Library Project was a Works Progress Administration (WPA) program in which the librarians, who were often called "book women" or "book ladies," delivered books to remote parts of Appalachia.

To share their inspiring stories with kids, we recommend "That Book Woman" for ages 4 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/that-book-woman) and "Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky" for ages 8 and up (https://amzn.to/3N8WAtf)

For adult readers, there are also several excellent historical fiction novels about these determined librarians: "The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek" (https://amzn.to/47ZbdHz), its sequel "The Book Woman's Daughter" (https://amzn.to/3RqH6Cn), and "The Giver of Stars" (https://amzn.to/4a0Ym9A)

05/04/2024

In a week with news in the usually hidden world of book distribution, we take a look inside how it works, and its deeper meanings, in our most recent Notebook: Unevenly Distributed.

by Ann Kjellberg, editor In a week with news in the usually hidden world of book distribution, we take a look inside how it works and what it means

03/04/2024

We are honored to share veteran immigration journalist Julia Preston's Review on Jonathan Blitzer's epic account of immigrant passage from Central America, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here. Open to all subscribers now!

A new book considers the consequences that US foreign policy in three small countries has had on immigration and social dynamics here