Audrey and I headed down to the East Village last night for the Radical Book Buzz with Library Freedom Project and Library Futures at The Francis Kite Club. The intimate event showcased the good work of the Library Freedom Project and Library Futures organizations, but also showcased ten publishers who support radical authors across a variety of genres.
|
No Straight Road Takes You There by Rebecca Solnit from - In the spirit of her bestselling book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit explores how our actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty. |
|
Talking About Abolition by Sonali Kolhatkar from - Abolitionist thinkers have been envisioning police-free communities for decades, but only in the aftershock of the racial justice uprisings of 2020 have their radical ideas entered into mainstream discourse. In Talking About Abolition, award-winning journalist Sonali Kolhatkar presents an inspiring collection of her conversations with scholars, movement figures, and activists who are leading the movement to end policing and prisons. From articulating the best counter-arguments to pervasive “copaganda,” to exposing the moral bankruptcy of reformism, each conversation connects the dots between past and present while imagining a collective future rooted in liberation, freedom, and justice. |
|
Motherdom by Alex Bollen from - When Alex Bollen had her first baby, the fear of being a bad mother made her guilty and anxious. A researcher with twenty years’ experience, she went looking for answers. To her surprise the studies she looked at were exaggerated and misrepresented in the media, forming the foundation for what she calls Good Mother myths. These myths are an assortment of narratives, ideologies and stereotypes, deployed to censure mothers and blame them for every societal ill. |
|
B. Traven, Portrait of a Famous Unknown by Golo from - B. Traven, Portrait of a Famous Unknown is a graphic biography that tells the larger-than-life story of the German revolutionary, actor, and writer known as B. Traven (1882–1969). |
|
If I Must Die by Refaat Alareer from - This rich, elegiac compilation of work from the late Palestinian poet and professor, Refaat Alareer, brings together his marvelous poetry and deeply human writing about literature, teaching, politics, and family. |
|
Mafalda by Quino from - INTRODUCING MAFALDA, by the legendary Argentine comic book artist Quino! Frank Wynne will translate five volumes of MAFALDA comics for Elsewhere Editions, with our first volume set to publish next spring. |
|
Sympathy For Wild Girls by Demree McGhee from - A runaway seeks shelter from violence with a pack of wild coyotes. A young woman falls into a hypocritical crew of white Christian YouTube influencers. A mother witnesses her daughter’s prophecy about the end of the world come true. In Sympathy for Wild Girls, young Black women yearn for intimacy and hunt for belonging in a subtly warped version of our world, where social mores loom like shadows and bigotry shape-shifts. |
|
Gabriële by Anne Berest & Claire Berest from - An atmospheric, exuberant novel from the best-selling author of The BookDescription, Postcard, Anne Berest, and her sister, Claire Berest, about love and sex, art and revolution, experimentation and creativity, and three young people who changed the world. |
|
King of the North by Anne Berest & Claire Berest from - The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South. But in this myth-shattering book, award-winning and New York Times bestselling historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King’s time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—outside Dixie—was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice. |
|
Ghassan Kanafani, Selected Political Writings by Ghassan Kanafani from - Ghassan Kanafani (1936 - 1972) is perhaps the greatest Palestinian novelist, whose books including Men in the Sun and Returning to Haifa documented the horrors of war and occupation. He was also a leading political thinker, strategist and revolutionary. Here, his writings on politics, history, national liberation and the media are collected in English for the first time |
I will be working through these titles, but also continuing to explore what is coming from these publishers. I published this list as YAML so that I can power future stories, but also feed my reminders to regularly tune into what these publishers offer and reduce my attention given to Amazon.
I am thankful for the work of these two organizations for making the event happen and bring together the publishers, but also everyone that made it out last night for such an important aspect of storytelling.
|
Library Freedom Project - Library Freedom Project is radically rethinking the library professional organization by creating a network of values-driven librarian-activists working together to build information democracy. |
|
Library Futures - We mobilize a community of experts to encourage the adoption of technologies that uplift libraries in the digital age, promoting new possibilities for preservation of and unfettered access to information. Library Futures is a project of The Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law. |
I walked away with more of an awareness of how the translation of radical books between languages, but also how the republishing of books that have gone out of print impacts our storytelling. I was also reminded of how this fucked up timeline we find ourselves in is driven by Amazon, Overdrive, Elsevier, and Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon and Shuster, and the other top book publishers.
As I make my way through these books I will publish more here about what I am reading, and when I find any new books from these publishers I will share as well. It feels like these outlets are our lifeline to the storytelling that is going to save us, sustain us, and bring us together in these troubling times. I don’t know about you, but I am looking to spend my time in the next few years reading and trying to attend as many events like this as I can to help me stay in tune with what truly matters.
