Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-10-17: Book Release!
Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. You can also read this email online here. Here we go...
My new book, "Afternoon Prayers," is out!
The official blurb:
An essential worker in Israel writes of day-to-day life in the first year of the pandemic. Walking through empty streets, navigating mazes of masks, lockdowns, and ever-changing regulations, he chronicles the uncertain fates of his city's people and businesses, his family's experiences in assisted living at the nearby House of a Hundred Grandmothers, and, at his office, the ritual of the Afternoon Prayers.
Greg Bossert wrote about it:
Joseph Zitt's precise, compassionate observations and his clear, poetic prose expand details of daily life into wonders, and place enormous events, not least the pandemic, into human scale. Characters drift in and out of the flow of life-from the office to the local shops to the busy streets-to reveal their stories. I was drawn into that same flow, the rhythm and churn of days, ritual and quiet, small revelation, captivated from start to finish. -- Gregory Norman Bossert (Winner of the World Fantasy Award)
The raw material is from the Facebook posts and newsletters that I wrote every day during the first year of the pandemic. (Claudia Crowley skillfully edited it, as she has since my first book, over 30 years ago.) Jessica Prather, once again, created a hopefully-eye-catching cover (from my photo of the actual afternoon prayers in action).
It's available in print from all the usual places online. In the US, I recommend getting it from your local bookstore or, online, from Bookshop, a consortium of independent booksellers. Outside the US, I use Blackwell's. (I'll link to them in the comments.)
I'm making the ebook available for free, under a Creative Commons license. Drop me an email or a private message, and I'll send you an EPUB, PDF, or both. (Don't worry if you don't know what those are. Your computer, phone, or other device should be able to open one or the other of them.) Feel free to pass them on to other folks who you think might like the book.
The print book is also as inexpensive as possible (though the price varies a little from shop to shop). I priced it so that the printing costs are covered (and Blackwell's and some other shops build in the shipping costs). Doing the math, I figured that if I were to charge more, the tiny amount of profit would be outweighed by the effort and costs of dealing with it, especially internationally. And I'm more interested in people reading it than in what money I might make. Unless, of course, someone wants to buy the movie rights :-)
(PS: I don't have a web page for the book yet. I should put something on my main site (which is looking kind of clunky and antiquated), and establish a site for my publishing company, Metatron Arts & Media, I already have a domain and empty WordPress site for it. Web development has gotten a whole lot more complicated in recent years, despite -- or perhaps because of -- the bazillion tools to make it easier. So I could use some help with that, if anyone's interested.)
So... here it is. Spread the word! As Andrew Hickey says, if you enjoy the book and my writing, tell just one person that you like it. "Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works gets noticed and sustain themselves." (And, of course, I'll be eager to hear what you think.)
Feel free to forward the newsletter to other people who might be interested.
Here’s an archive of past newsletters.
You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.
The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me at that Las Vegas address, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
L'hitraot.