Living to Read the Obits
Recs, reminders, and (CW) self promotion
This week, I want to thank everyone who subscribed or upgraded after my last newsletter. I didn’t realize I would hit such a nerve, but I’m glad I did. Your support helps a lot and I’m grateful to have it.
I also thought it would be a good time to offer some recommendations, as I’ve been reading a lot of wonderful stuff lately. Maybe the most encouraging difference between 2017 and 2025 is that so many writers’ tolerance for bullshit has vanished. It’s a dark time, but that doesn’t mean our paths forward aren’t clear.
The Personal Part (skip if you’re ruthless)
But first, I wanted to say that it’s March 4th, and The Future Was Color has been on shelves for nine months. I’m grateful to have written a novel that’s connected with so many readers. I guess historical fiction about making a life and finding pleasure while the world numbly awaits its destruction turned out to be even more relevant than I’d planned — or hoped.
Some news about the novel: the paperback edition arrives in stores on June 10th. If you were to preorder a copy, the demand would help stores determine how many to order for stock. At the same time, if you still want a hardcover, there’s no moment like the present for an impulse purchase. And as a bonus, if you want a personalized and signed first edition, order it from SubText Books, where I work. Just add a note to your order and I’ll write whatever you want, including a big thank you, and ship it myself. <3
One last thing about me, then the fun part. As I said in another newsletter, I’m preparing for a big and ambiguous life change and expanding my client list accordingly. If you’re interested in working together on a manuscript or you’re looking for something more commercial, please let me know! Or just spread the word if you can. I also have a new website which makes contacting me about these things a lot easier than it was before.
Now —
The Fun Part
What is everyone else writing? A lot of good shit, as it turns out. Ada Calhoun’s Crush, which came out last week, is like if Jane Austen had read Walter Benjamin — a breezy, sharp, and incredibly intelligent take on a marriage’s overextension and dissolution, as well as its replacement with a passionate new affair. It’ll be one of my 2025 favs, I’m afraid. I read it right after Katie Kitamura’s spooky and unsettling new novel, Audition, which comes out in April. The only thing I can compare the latter to is David Lynch’s Inland Empire, but I won’t elaborate on that. You’ll just have to read it.
Later this year, Riverhead will publish Hal Ebbott’s debut novel, Among Friends — which is beautifully written and incredibly strange. I hope to write about it more at length. It’s as though a mid-century Salter novel got trapped in a freezer and suddenly awoken, but with enough of a canny understanding of contemporary relationships to hold your attention — and to upset you. It’s bothered me ever since I read it, in interesting ways.
I also just finished Ayşegül Savaş enthralling novel, The Anthropologists, which came out last summer. Set in an unnamed city that is absolutely Paris, Savaş introduces us to a couple, each of whom is from a different country, on the eve of setting down more permanent roots by buying an apartment. I can’t think of another novel that’s so effortlessly captured how it feels to be in a city in which, up until now, you’ve been young — and now, suddenly, you’re not.
Outside of books, there’s a lot of thinking going on — and the thoughts are strong and clear. In an essay that just lit me up,
raised what in my view is the core issue for what passes as leftist struggle and resistance: agency. “I am tired of the sad, yearning, droopy mentality that pervades so much of the language of ‘discourse,’” he says, then adds how important it is forreasonable people to reclaim the concepts of will, and power, and take them permanently away from the far-right and the fascists. I would like if we immediately cultivated a culture of friction, tension, strong disagreements, and struggle. Because Christ almighty, will we need it. We have to be messy. We have to break the fascists, and then rebuild the world. We need to be honest about the world we want, and we have to fight for it.
In the theme of “connective” verses sensitive discourse (which I touched on last week),
published a wonderful essay about the false friend that is “relatability,” especially in terms of art: “Relatability is the bottom of the barrel in terms of building a just, functional society. Relatability doesn’t build solidarity; it makes for bland replication and cliques.” It’s a marvelous read for those tired of talking about books as lifestyle objects. And just yesterday, Alicia wrote a brief but cutting piece about an encounter in a coffee shop with a man whose “interest in real estate” betrayed his unfortunate intentions. The “gentrifier” is someone whose purchase of property convinces him that he’s entitled, in some way, to the entire neighborhood. This gets at a key concept in contemporary American consumerism — something the tech industry is especially gleeful to push onto its user base — which is the idea that culture can be bought or subscribed to, rather than worked toward, supported, or cultivated. One “tours” beauty by being “adjacent” to it, as Alicia says:It’s always interesting to me how much these guys love food and restaurants, and they love meeting my husband, the historian, who can tell them everything about different types of balconies — which century, which style. They love to be adjacent to beauty, to consume it, without seeming to fully comprehend that their money, their tax breaks, their real estate dreams mean the artists and working people are pushed out.
In maybe the most motivating, life-affirming ten words I’ve seen anywhere in the last few years,
reminded me of why I’m still alive and still trying to find out what I think in this era of absolute nonsense, and that is to “live to see their downfall; live to see them die.” But really, you have to just roll around in the whole paragraph. It feels like picking up a brick:Clench your fucking fist and remember who the fuck you are. Live well and defiantly and by your values. Personally I’m interested in being — and being around people who are — brave, honorable, unfragile, capable, thoughtful, and in possession of style, humor, and moral nerve. Maybe you are too. Defiance, once you’ve tapped into it, is useful. It can give you an animating energy, it can remind you of your own aliveness and stamina. Anger is better, always, than despair. Take in what they’re doing, what it means. Tell yourself you want to live past this. Live to see their downfall; live to see them die.
After Trump posted that awful algorithmically generated genocidal propaganda video, I read
’s sharp and strident essay about the shift in the world’s Hegelian order. While I’m not sure I agree with the inevitability of this shift in values based on technological advancement, I did appreciate his insight into the relationship between politics and language going forward, something that Trump has continually disintegrated since 2015:The AI-slop video of the Gaza Riviera is to my mind a far more destabilizing piece of propaganda than Trump’s claim to be above the law, which, for all its disdain for our old regime’s Constitution and for all the hard work those good Founding Fathers put into it, at least had the virtue of being expressed in human language, and therefore of being open to refutation. I suspect we will be seeing ever fewer instances of politics-through-language in the coming years, and ever more politics-through-slop, the cumulative effect of which will be a widespread and constant experience of alienation (whether gleeful or despondent), a general and persistent epistemic fog. The most common reaction will be not: “How dare they?” but rather: “WTF am I even seeing?” This is all by design — the purpose is to outsource the exercise of power to automated systems we are not even in principle capable of understanding.
In her ongoing series about gender roles and their political manifestations,
raised the specter of the inevitable “childless cat guy,” now that more and more men are single and, frankly, unfuckable:The difference between the childless cat ladies who defined the prior paradigm we’ve come to know and the childless cat men of the future is that the childless cat ladies often became such as an intentional shirking of expectations — avoiding the “what happens” that has long pushed women toward marriage and motherhood. The childless cat men will become such as a matter of ease. They are not defying expectations, but existing exactly according to the structural isolation and anomie society is bending toward.
In a brief exploration of the political or ethical self-reflection that so many leftists have performed publicly after Trump’s win,
gets at the distinction between the maligned aesthetics of DEI and “wokeness” versus its overlooked (and relatively undiscussed) real-world benefits:I am sad when people say anarchists have immature political analysis, because it feels far more immature to keep naming the problems and then returning to the same things that have never worked. No president (and certainly no DEI program) has ever reduced the reality of this kind of violence because the nation state requires it.
Lastly,
wrote a beautiful essay about meditation, illness, and death, which brought up what seems to me the most important question about “health” in the world we live in, the world we’ve let happen:But of course, the self and the world keep happening, keep unfolding as aspects of reality to love, to live in, to endure, to suffer. I’m able to achieve higher consciousness, and peace, and experiences of/with God, every day on my mat briefly. But what does that mean? And what does it do?
If you enjoy any of these essays, please don’t hesitate to subscribe. I can vouch for them all.
That’s all for this week. Coming soon from Entertainment, Weakly: the fascist as gamer in a world of non-player characters; the revolution was televised, actually; the antifascist potential in UX design; the imaginative geometry in the work of Sophie Calle; and a conversation about reading The Great Gatsby in its hundredth year.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for paying, if you’ve paid, and thank you for considering it, if you haven’t. Thank you for reading for free if that’s all you can afford. And thank you for hanging in there. As Mathews said, let’s live to see their downfall. Let’s live to read those obits.
I love these book round-ups! I always come away from them adding titles to my to-read list.
Thank you so much for including me, Patrick! Also, I'm heading to LA in a few weeks for my first time ever and I just bought your theme-appropriate book to read on the plane. :)