Get in, readers, we're going on tour!
Book tour, tension, and some things I'm reading
Have you pre-ordered Beings yet?
If you have, you can claim some really fun swag!
Hello there, friends!
I would have written you a lot sooner but a windfall of a gig fell into my lap and as a freelancer who is always (and I do mean always) hustling for work, I had to devote myself entirely to it for a few weeks and I’m still catching my breath.
And then, of course, there’s the fact that the horrors continue to persist1, but you don’t need me to tell you that. Sarah Thankam Mathews (author of All This Could Be Different) recently wrote about the difficulty of speech in times like these, (h/t to Emma Copley Eisenberg’s own newsletter for pointing me there) and I don’t know that I can say anything better than she has.
Will I ever be able to begin a letter to you without acknowledging this tension, without grappling with the difficulty of existing in a time of truly needless violence and suffering being inflicted upon so many people? I’m not sure. I know it’s uncomfortable—for you, probably; for me, certainly—and also, airing that insistent voice in my head always interrupting my thoughts by asking “but what about X? and Y? and Z?” was the only thing that allowed me to actually write Beings. Without allowing that voice in, without allowing questions of morality regarding writing, artmaking, storytelling, and belief to enter into the novel, I would never have been able to get started, let alone finish. Increasingly, I think, I am interested in trying to live in this tension, to make art in it, write through it. I compartmentalize as much as the next person—doing so is basically a requirement of contemporary living and relative sanity-keeping—but when I sit down to write, something happens, and the compartments all begin to leak out, creating a muddy and somewhat rancid puddle. It’s too big to jump over, so I have to splish-splash my way through it and hope that you’ll still be there, on the other side, waiting for me.
Are you?
Good. Without further ado, then, I’m excited to announce that Beings and I (and my partner and our toddler) are going on tour! I’d absolutely love to see you at one of the following events2:
Wednesday, September 24 / Los Angeles, CA
Skylight Books with Gabrielle Korn (RSVP recommended)
(Gabrielle has published three incredible books: a book of essays, and two queer sci-fi novels)Monday, September 29 / Philadelphia, PA
Head House Books with Emma Copley Eisenberg
(Emma has written a book of nonfiction that mixes reportage and memoir and an amazing novel and has a short story collection coming out next year)Tuesday, September 30 / Washington, DC
Loyalty Bookstore with Amber Sparks
(Amber has written several perfect short story collections and has a novel coming out in October, more on which below)Wednesday, October 1 / New York, NY
The Strand Bookstore
(conversation partner TBA; tickets are required for this one!)Thursday, October 2 / Providence, RI
Riffraff Bookstore and Bar
(conversation partner TBA)Friday, October 3 / Boston, MA
Porter Square Books in partnership with The History Project, Boston’s queer history archive
(RSVP recommended)Thursday, October 9 / Bronxville, NY
Sarah Lawrence College
This will be a craft talk on the use of voice in fiction!Saturday, October 11 / Tarzana, CA
Sunny’s Bookshop
(conversation partner TBA)Wednesday, November 12 / Lincoln, NE
Francie & Finch Bookshop
(conversation partner TBA)
(At the bottom of this email you’ll also find the tour poster if you’re a visual kind of person.)
Recent publications
Some stuff I’ve written recently:
For the Los Angeles Review of Books, I interviewed Katharine Coldiron, a multi-genre writer and thinker I admire greatly, about her new book, Out There in the Dark.
For the Los Angeles Times, I reviewed Kashana Cauley’s new novel, The Payback, which is a hoot and a half (and also creepily prescient).
For The Washington Post, I reviewed The Other Wife by Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, which was an extremely rewarding (and tender and funny) read.
For the Los Angeles Times again, I reviewed Emma Sloley’s new book, The Island of Last Things, which I loved as well and which was beautiful and sad and hopeful and upsetting in ways I kept being surprised by.
What I’m reading3 (just—gasp—for fun!)
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
I’m 770 pages into this delicious thousand-page mass market paperback4 which my partner got me for my birthday a couple months ago because he’d been researching books about parallel universes for something I’m thinking about writing. I don’t think he realized—and I certainly didn’t—how much of the book is basically philosophical conversations between a bunch of incredibly smart dweebs of the non-religious-monk variety. That makes it sound really boring, but it’s not, it’s thrilling, and it somehow has a ton of intrigue and (kind of?) aliens in it too? This is the book I read before bed these days and I’m riveted.Happy People Don’t Live Here by Amber Sparks (out October 14)
I’ve been a fan of Amber’s short storied for a long time (I reviewed her last collection for NPR in 2020), and I was thrilled when she announced that she’d written a novel. I am about halfway through, and having so many big feelings about it. It has Amber’s trademark whimsy-paired-with-grief, a bittersweet flavor that is so heartachingly necessary to being a human being in the world. It’s the story of a mother and daughter who move into an apartment complex that was once a sanitorium and accidentally bring a ghost back to life, but it’s also about being a single parent of a child who has a big imagination and a growing understanding of reality in all its misfortune—and about being a child like that. I’ve been reading it mostly while I take walks, and the setting’s smallness pairs perfectly, somehow, with being outdoors.This Place Kills Me by Mariko Tamaki and Nicole Goux
Mariko Tamaki is one of the cool writer friends I’ve made since moving to LA, and she’s also one of the most prolific people I know (she writes novels, graphic novels, and comics, and has also written a bunch for TV). Her newest graphic novel—a murder mystery set in an all-girls boarding school in the 1980s—is gorgeously illustrated by Nicole Goux. I went to their launch last week, and listening to the two of them talk about what it was like to work together made me think about how freaking cool it is that art can be made by teams of people in this way. I’m only about 50 pages in, but I’m incredibly hooked, and I absolutely love the style and the way the story is working within the format.Out of the Void by Leslie F. Stone
This is a reread—it’s a 1929 science fiction novella that I’m still hoping to write about so I won’t say much more now, but it is wild, by which I mean it is both steeped in the casual eugenicist ideas that permeated the early 20th century and also incredibly queer and liberatory and forward thinking. (It’s out of print, alas, and only available in this incredible anthology Women of Tomorrow edited by Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp.)
That’s all for right now. Thank you for being here!
Yours,
Ilana
My life feels very small and minor and inconsequential in the midst of active genocides, governmental overreach, ascendant fascism, ICE raids, wars full of humans and drones and misinformation… But, I remind myself when the weight of all this knowledge and its attendant relative powerlessness begin to press on my chest and make me feel like I’m drowning in the (epigenetically? narratively?) inherited survivor’s guilt: What is the point of trying to create a better world, of attempting to reduce suffering in the one we have now, if it isn’t so that we can all share the privilege of living small and minor lives? ↩
Links lead to the event if it’s up at the bookstore already and, if not, link to my book at that store (or just to the store itself) in case you’re local and want to pre-order it from there. ↩
…other than a bunch of children’s books, that is, which are also fun. But as you’ve seen already, I can write a whole freaking newsletter on just one, so I’m not going to get into them right now. Maybe another time. ↩
I truly believe all books should come out as mass market paperbacks because not only are they much cheaper to make and thus their price point is much lower, but they’re also just fantastically tactile and rich to the senses. I love everything about them: how their ink leaks onto your fingers; the way they smell of printing and glue; how much thicker they make books feel; how light they are; how satisfying it is to watch their spines slowly crease and crinkle as you work your way through them… ↩