Lurching towards the book tour
Welcome back, and hallo new subscribers! Today’s issue is mostly book, tour, and podcast news. In less than two weeks I head to the US for a few weeks of talks - it’s a project management assignment, for sure.
It’s two weeks since the US pub date of HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY. The first print has run sold through - the UC Press warehouse is empty! Books are in the hands of readers or in stores/store warehouses. Thank you everyone who bought HUMANS or recommended it to folks! The second printing should be in the Press warehouse soon. When it lands, retailers for whom it’s out of stock will be able to order it.
For now, Bookshop.org (which supports independent bookstores) will let you backorder the book; Book Culture in New York City has copies; and Amazon has it in stock (how many did they hoard?!). Does your local indie bookstore still have a copy? I’d love to know; feel free to add a note in the comments!
The UK pub date is March 4th, and I’m reliably informed that pre-ordered copies have begun shipping straight to readers.
I’ve spent the past two weeks recording podcast and radio interviews (links later in this newsletter). And I’ve started spending a couple of hours each day working on my next book project idea. This will be on something else strange and creepy - stranger and creepier than monsters, I think.
That’s the toughest writerly thing about writing for a living - managing overlapping projects. One of the things that makes it doable for me is that I’m carrying over some of the thinking from HUMANS to the next possible book idea.
Join me for the HUMANS virtual launch event!
Tomorrow, Weds 19th Feb, will be the launch event for HUMANS - it’s free and online!
If you’re free at 09:30am PST / 12:30pm EST / 5:30pm GMT / 6:30pm CEST, please join me and Leah Redmond Chang, Ricardo Padrón, Caroline Dodds Pennock, and Tamara J. Walker for an hour-long informal, sometimes zany panel discussion about my book, generously sponsored by the Society for Renaissance Studies.
You’ll need to register to get the joining link - click here to do so.
Can’t make it but would like to attend something else? My virtual and in-person events are at this link. The next two virtual events are on Feb. 21 and Feb. 24.
Podcasts and radio
It’s been fun to notice the lines from the book that grab a lot of people. One of them is:
“There are no monsters, and all of them are real.”
The interviewers in the two recordings just out this week both asked me about this:
I talked to Mitch Jeserich on Letters & Politics (KPFA Radio, Berkeley CA) about how systems of classification lie at the origins of science, society, and the modern world. We explored how people explained the causes of monsters in the past, theories about the parameters of “normal,” and how societies tell on themselves through the stories they tell about monsters - and about who gets to be a citizen.
I also talked with Sophie McBain on the Intelligence Squared podcast. We discussed Star Trek, the roots of HUMANS in a random astrobiology conference, an eighteenth-century “Irish giant,” race, nation, a little hairy girl in the Renaissance called Antoinette Gonsalvus, and how tech corporations are monstrifying humanity writ large.
HUMANS in the wild!
It’s been fun to see photos on social media of readers with their books - or their pets or cups of coffee with their books. Do feel free to tag me with your book photos or quotations of your favourite lines! I’m terminally online on BlueSky and attempt to remember to open IG, Threads, and Mastodon each day.
If you’ve read the book and enjoyed it, it would be fabulous if you could rate and review it on Amazon, Goodreads, or Storygraph. A sentence or a paragraph is plenty! Just imagine you’re meeting someone for coffee and they asked you what you’ve been reading.
Book tour
If you’d like to attend an in-person event they start on March 4, in Washington, DC. The rest of the events are at this link.
You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,
BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),
and Instagram/Threads (@surekhadavies).