Gremlins, pitchforkery, and Monstertopia
Some writing and (mis)adventures - and a 40% discount on HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY!
Happy New Year! I hope your book gift dreams came true over the holiday season. On that subject…
A 40% discount on HUMANS!
Earlier this month, HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY made its first conference appearance - at the American Historical Association annual meeting in New York City. I’m delighted to share that the conference discount of 40% is still available. Preorder now; buy copies as gifts; the book will be published on Feb 4!
Readers in the US and Canada: order directly from the University of California Press, and use the code UCPAHA.
Readers in the the United Kingdom, Europe, Africa, India, and the Middle East: email customer@wiley.co.uk (the University Press Group, www.upguk.com), and use the code UCPAHA.
Readers everywhere else: order directly from the University of California Press, and use the code UCPAHA.
An evergreen discount code: UCPSAVE30 - for 30% off from the vendors above.
Gremlins
Gremlins inhabit the ether between my newsletter and your inbox. One of my mailing-list settings allowed gremlins (OK, server bots) to unsubscribe a few people during routine checks when my last newsletter went out. (The gremlins clicked on the “unsubscribe” button.) I’ve re-subscribed everyone who seemingly unsubscribed in fury at 3:08am, Eastern Time, on Christmas Day, seemingly incensed at my suggestion that billionaires should pay a hell of a lot more tax. If you DID unsubscribe in fury at 3:08am, please feel free to do so again (gulp). There is now an “are you sure?” screen to confuse gremlins, but actual humans can still run away from the newsletter screaming, at any time.
Pitchforkery
Getting the word out about a book for the general public is vital for the sales needed to get a publisher to take a chance on your next book. (And I’d really like folks to buy and read this one, too.) And so my podcast and interview season has just started up!
I was interviewed by Michael Berk, the managing editor of The Ink, the newsletter of former foreign correspondent and columnist for the New York Times Anand Giridharadas. The Ink is a terrific current affairs and contemporary history newsletter with, among other things, regular interviews with and occasional extracts from authors.
Since the stuff of my PhD hasn’t been current affairs for half a millennium, I wondered whether the interview would feel like a tricksy job interview. To be sure, HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY stretches from antiquity to the twenty-first century. And it has a lot of US history and culture, colonial and modern. But an interview for a politics newsletter, even one that had agreed to run an excerpt from my book? This was all sorts of new and exciting.
The interview began. The first thing Michael brought up was not an arcane piece of law or even the current news cycle but … Star Trek. And that’s when I knew I was going to have the funnest time chatting, as we did for about an hour and a quarter.
Our conversation ranged from Star Trek and The Muppet Show to the Atlantic slave trade and the present political moment which, in my view, calls for non-violent forms of pitchforkery: action and organizing in service of a better future for everyone.
You can read an essay based on that interview, and an extract from HUMANS, at this link. If you don’t subscribe to The Ink, a seven-day free trial will make this issue and all the archives available.
Monstertopia
I wrote a blog post, “From an Age of Monsters to Monstertopia?”, for the University of California Press website. In it I note that humanity is being pushed to the margins of the future. How do we live in an age when human beings are increasingly framed as a threat or an inconvenience – or a monster?
We need to notice how laws and customs invent monsters - monsters are stories that do powerful work in the world. We might replace monstrification with monstrofuturism to build a Monstertopia.
You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,
BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),
Instagram/Threads (@surekhadavies),
and LinkedIn (@surekhadavies-53711753/)
That interview was such a fun read - congrats!