THE MILLIONS BOOK PREVIEW for the second half of 2018 has dropped, bringing joy unto us all in these dark times. I was cranky when I read this and therefore only wrote down, like, six books on my TBR list. SUCCESS.

“The idea that everyone involved is playing a game of three-dimensional chess at all times can be grounds to reinterpret or dismiss even the most contradictory signals as needed, to make sure the theory keeps working.” Zan Romanoff on celebrity relationship conspiracy theories.

Niceness and small towns in romance novels.

How to write about Africa.

The Female Relationship Resume isn’t an actual metric we need to care about.

Sarah McCarry is actually an excellent readalike to Jordy Rosenberg’s new novel Confessions of a Fox, and I love her review. And here’s Jordy Rosenberg himself on writing trans stories and the multiplicity of authorship.

Here is a big list of cult books. Yay. (Books about cults, btw, not books with a cult following.)

Matt Zoller Seitz on Nanette and the future of stand-up comedy.

Here’s some of the reasons I didn’t get on Amazon this past week. (I used Goodreads a bit because I forgot it was an Amazon product. Grrrrrr.)

There’s no such thing as a feminist company. Companies are not your friends. They will never be your friends.

This is an experimental DIY library in Brooklyn!

I LOVE AKASHIC BOOKS. Here is a day in the life of an indie publisher.

If you’re readathoning, follow me on Twitter so we can be readathon buddies! And I wish a wonderfully pleasant weekend to readathoners and non-readathoners alike!

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Which is why I’m mightily grateful to Sarah of The Illustrated Page for putting me onto Rivers Solomon’s debut, An Unkindness of Ghosts. It’s a dystopian story about a generation ship, the Matilda, that sharply segregates its people by class. The (mostly darker-skinned) citizens of the lower decks are subject to forced labor, daily headcounts, floggings if they step out of line, and the whims of the guards who patrol their decks. In spite of this, our heroine Aster has managed to teach herself medicine and science from the gen ship’s archives and wangle a friendship with the ship’s revered priest/Surgeon, Theo. Poring through her late mother’s journals, Aster realizes that there may be a way to escape from the Matilda, but it will require all of her resources — and perhaps cost the lives of those she loves — to make it happen.

Friends, An Unkindness of Ghosts is dark. The lives of the people on the lower decks are filled with brutalities perpetrated by those in power, including the second in line for the throne of the Matilda, a cruel Lieutenant who resents Aster’s friendship with Theo. Solomon isn’t as graphic with the sexual violence as I was fearing, but violence of every kind stands as a constant threat, and regular reality, of Aster’s world. So be braced for it.

The book’s light is Aster’s survival, and her insistence on finding (or, more often, making) pockets of beauty and joy in a world that tries to deny that she’s deserving of either. She’s angry and dogged, and she most wonderfully refuses to pretend to be anyone other than who she is. She’s black and autistic and intersex, and no matter how many people tell her that one or all of those things makes her worthless, she persists in knowing her own worth, valuing her own intelligence, and chasing after the things she wants. Here’s what author Rivers Solomon says about the book and the question that stands at its center.

An Unkindness of Ghosts is a brutal novel with hope at its core, and it should make you really excited for everything Rivers Solomon is going to write hereafter. It’s published by Akashic Books, an independent publisher I absolutely cherish.

Thanks to my lovely friend Alice for picking me up an ARC at BEA this year! If you want to read more by/about Rivers Solomon, you can check out their Patreon for regular content (poems, flash fiction, short essays, etc).

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Have you heard about Akashic Books? They are great. They are an independent publishing company that seeks out and publishes work by “authors who are either ignored by the mainstream, or who have no interest in working within the ever-consolidating ranks of the major corporate publishers.” As you might suspect based on that description, they are based in Brooklyn.

Anyway, one of the many ways in which Akashic Books is great is that it has an imprint called Peekash Press that’s dedicated to the literature of the Caribbean. And one of Peekash Press’s books is New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, edited by Karen Lord. This is great because SFF was my first love and remains my true love, and I am always thrilled to expand my knowledge of SFF authors who aren’t white or American. You can zip through New Worlds Old Ways in a few hours (it’s short!), but you’ll come away with many new authors whose work you can investigate thereafter.

A few highlights:

“A New Life in a New Time,” by Portia Subran, is about a slightly hapless office worker called Bernard who works in cryonics; the story speaks to both office politics and the human desire for immortality, so naturally I was all about it.

“Daddy,” by Damion Wilson, starts like this: “It was the day I buried my sister that I discovered my father could teleport.” So. I mean.”

“Cascadura,” by H. K. Williams, is about the longest-lived woman in the entire world. She has seen the end of the world as we now know it and survived into a new world. I find immortality exhausting to contemplate, and “Cascadura” really did it for me. (Cf “A New Life in a New Time.)

Check out this collection and then dive into Akashic’s whole catalog. They’re great; you won’t be sorry.

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