Hot News This Week
June 20, 2024
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| On Sunday, three titles published by Theatre Communications Group won gold at the 2024 Tony Awards:
- Stereophonic by David Adjmi, with composer Will Butler, won five trophies, including Best New Play
- Suffs by Shaina Taub won Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score
- Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins won three trophies, including Best Play Revival
Three cheers for the many artists honored!
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“Loving Corrections is the prophetic little sister of bell hooks’s All About Love. . . . This book claims its rightful place among the great liberation works that our future deserves. What a gift.” — Evisa Gallman, Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books (Philadelphia, PA)
“I’ve spent a week savoring this slim book and never want it to end. Thankfully, her footnotes give so many sources for further reading, so I can stay in this world much longer. A perfect book for changemakers to start.” — Alissa Redmond, South Main Book Company (Salisbury, NC)
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“On Strike against God is a snapshot between the second and third wave of feminism, early lesbian writing, a departure from Russ’s typical genre, and so much more. It is lovely to see this book in reprint complete with essays from contemporary writers like Jeanne Thornton giving Russ her dues.” — Audrey Kohler, BookWoman (Austin, TX)
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| A Call to End Forced Prison Labor in the US
“Today, a majority of the 1.2 million Americans locked up in state and federal prisons work under duress in jobs . . . for wages as low as a few cents per hour or, in several states, for nothing at all.”
On Wednesday, to mark Juneteenth, Abolition Labor authors Andrew Ross, Aiyuba Thomas, and Tommaso Bardelli published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for an end to forced prison labor in the US. “Labor that people have no meaningful right to refuse and that is enforced under conditions of total control is, unquestionably, slavery,” they write. Read the piece here.
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| Read This Next: a “Spunky Tale about Young, Would-be Literary Men”
On June 18, the New York Times Book Review ran a full review of Living Things, Munir Hachemi’s debut novel translated by Julia Sanches. The author’s “impetuous, upstart spirit infuses this short and spunky tale about young, would-be literary men who hit the road in search of adventure but find bleakness and exploitation,” says writer Rob Doyle in the piece. “Hachemi’s documentary-style accounts of low-paid factory labor compellingly take us where most fiction writers would rather not go.”
Living Things
by Munir Hachemi, trans. Julia Sanches
Coach House Books • June 2024 • 9781552454770
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| | May Our Joy Endure
by Kevin Lambert, trans. Donald Winkler
Biblioasis • September 2024 • 9781771966207
★ “An astute critique of entrenched power. . . . Lambert weaves a hypnotic narrative, smoothly translated from French by Winkler, about greed and inequality, hypocrisy, and, not least, a ‘dangerous notion of purity’ emerging from vociferous public clamor.” — Kirkus Reviews
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| | What I Know About You
by Éric Chacour, trans. Pablo Strauss
Coach House Books • September 2024 • 9781552454855
★ “A splendid exercise in melancholy and heartbreak with highly empathetic characters, Chacour’s first novel is beautifully written and superbly translated from the French by Pablo Strauss. It is not to be missed.” — Booklist
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| | Brittle Joints
by Maria Sweeney
Street Noise Books • June 2024 • 9781951491260
★ “By highlighting both the truth of the struggles and the joys, Sweeney presents a fuller picture of the disability experience.” — Booklist
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“The resulting pages are a triumph of intermedia storytelling. They feature photographs, letters, show bills, and other documents from the archive, as well as quotes from his family, friends, lovers, and collaborators.” — The FADER
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“An unusual medley of phenomenal stories . . . this anthology offers Afrocentric fiction, stories beautifully canvassed and etched out with the finest strokes that sometimes coat stories within stories.” — Locus Magazine
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| | Cecilia
by K-Ming Chang
Coffee House Press • May 2024 • 9781566897075
“If your tastes bend more to the surreal, K-Ming Chang’s novella Cecilia is the skin-crawling fever dream for you. . . . [Chang’s] subject is the gleaming cobweb of erotic obsession that falls like a veil.” — Washington Post
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| New Digital Review Copies
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Sex Goblin
by Lauren Cook
Nightboat Books • May 2024 • 9781643622330
“It’s not often a book entertains as easily as Sex Goblin does while simultaneously speaking to the monstrousness of being in a body at all.” — Mathuson Anthony, Book Club Bar (New York City, NY)
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According to Nylon, the Japanese House (aka musician Amber Bain) and her band’s book club are now reading Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, translated by Ros Schwartz (Transit Books).
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On June 12, The Atlantic recommended Mario Levrero’s The Luminous Novel, translated by Annie McDermott (And Other Stories), on a list of books to read if you’re in a creative slump.
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On June 15, Diana Matar’s My America (Global Book Sales / GOST Books) was featured by CNN Style.
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