My story in the Summer issue of the Review starts with a character receiving a letter from a boyfriend of twenty-five years ago, and one of the Review’s editors, in search of recommendations for this column, asked if I’d like to write about a piece of epistolary fiction that inspired me. I was pretty sure there wasn’t a particular inspiration, is the thing, and when the editor’s email arrived, I had a flu and a few degrees of fever, so I put her request aside and got back on my sofa and under my blanket, returning to The Demon Lover and Other Stories, which Elizabeth Bowen wrote during World War II. My husband gave me the book more than a decade ago, and for some reason, it was finally calling out to be read.

The first stories in the book are sketches of Londoners dislodged from their identities by aerial bombings. A recent New Yorker article about disaster care describes the small items of function and decoration in people’s lives—pencil sharpener, teakettle, photo in a frame—as the “furniture of self,” and many of Bowen’s characters find themselves feeling uncanny and disenchanted after the loss of items that once made up their context and setting. In the middle stories, Bowen goes at the problem from the other end, writing about people unsettled by the unexpected return of things that once gave them context. A woman inherits a skeleton clock that she is told she cared for passionately as a child but has no memory of. Another woman, in a nightclub on a boozy date, hears a dance tune that her father used to try to sing. And in the title story, “The Demon Lover,” a third woman, returning to her bomb-cracked, boarded-up house to rescue a few items, finds a letter from the man she was engaged to during World War I—twenty-five years prior. 

The coincidental resonance/overlap with my own short story was eerie. Maybe I had read this story before and repressed it, the way Bowen’s heroine represses the memory of her skeleton clock? I don’t think so, though I’m at the age where that can’t be ruled out. Maybe twenty-five years is just a resonant interval, for me as well as for Bowen—it’s the time it takes for youth to turn into middle age. It’s also roughly the gap between World War I and II, which may be why it reappears in story after story of hers. As the reader advances through the collection, her stories turn out—more and more explicitly—to be ghost stories. A woman two-timing her husband starts to feel “disliked” by a presence in her bedroom. In perhaps the most beautiful story, “The Happy Autumn Fields,” a woman dozing in a bomb-shattered building dreams of having been another person altogether, in another century, and can’t shake the sense that her dreamed self is her real one. 

In a postscript to the collection, Bowen writes about why the past seemed more vivid during World War II—why it haunted the present—and her language is weirdly evocative of what it felt like to live through COVID. “In war-time many people had strange deep intense dreams,” she writes. 

Last night I had a dream that Kim Kardashian and I were planning a lunch for a whole bunch of people. I have no idea who those people were. I just know that Kim and I had to plan a lunch together, a small one, maybe a lunch that would serve as a planning session for a second, larger lunch. It is my suspicion that in this dream I was working as a publicist, which serves me right, because I have been short with a few publicists in my life, though I do love a good publicist and appreciate that I myself would not be a good publicist. But in this dream I seemed to be holding my own.

Kim and I talked on the phone for a long time, making plans, debating salads, sandwiches, “small plates,” and the amounts of each that we needed. What would people drink? How many different canned or bottled drinks did we need? We said “uh-huh” and “mmmm” a lot. I was intensely bored but also aware that I was talking to Kim Kardashian. I could see Kim in my dream even though I was talking to her on a landline, a situation where you do not see the person you’re talking to. I was in the dream and watching it too.

I should have known I was in a dream because both of our phones were old-fashioned ones, with long coiled plastic cords. Kim’s phone was avocado green, mine bright yellow. Both of the phones in my house growing up—one attached to the kitchen wall, and one the kind you could walk around with, with an extra long cord, that was stationed in my parents’ bedroom—were white or off-white.

 

Let’s start with the dark stuff. On Saturday night in San Francisco, after the second-to-last-ever Dead & Co. show, every single ATM near the ballpark was apparently out of cash, because people couldn’t stop buying balloons filled with nitrous oxide, huffing them on the street for just a few more seconds of feeling high. The bars nearby were overrun, quite literally, long after everyone should have been at home. People go down at shows—it happened right in front of us one night, the medics rushing in and carrying someone out. There are, not infrequently, overdoses. There is too much of everything, sometimes. “I’m at that point in a bender where beer isn’t really doing anything for me anymore,” I heard someone joke on day three of the three-show run.

It is not that easy to drink yourself to death, actually, which I know because I have watched a lot of people try, but I could imagine it happening to many people in the context of the long slide of years or decades spent following the band. I always think “There but for the grace of God go I,” and I really mean it. So many people are dead and gone, among them the Dead’s lead songwriter, guitarist, and singer Jerry Garcia, who was killed by his own addiction to heroin at the age of fifty-three. “Do you think of Jerry as a prophet or a saint?” my friend asked me on Sunday as we got ready for the last show ever. The mood was elegiac, though the fact of finality wasn’t really sinking in, which might be why we kept repeating it over and over. “I can’t believe it’s really the last one,” someone said, not for the first time. “What are we even going to do next summer?” my friend lamented. “Are we going to like … have to get really into Phish?” “We are NOT getting into Phish,” someone else insisted, though we all agreed we would probably go see Phish at Madison Square Garden in August.

We put on our last clean Dead T-shirts—we were all running low and trading with one another—and headed back to the ballpark. A few of us had decided last minute to upgrade our tickets so we could be on the floor. I had never been on the floor for a Dead & Co. show; we always don’t spend the extra money and regret it later, so this time, one last time, we were not going to make that mistake. I said I wanted to hear “Bertha,” and we got it, right away, and right away we knew that every single member of the band was completely on, locked in. Bobby, as my friend observed, was “really cooking.” Jeff Chimenti, Oteil Burbridge, Mickey Hart, also cooking. And Mayer—I have never seen him, perhaps, cook like that, leaning into every moment harder than I have ever seen him lean, and he always leans in hard, given that he is probably among other things one of the greatest living guitarists.

We went to the lot. The lot, my younger brother observed—he was a first-time Dead & Co. show attendee—was “literally just a parking lot.” In fact it was a parking lot adjacent to the Port of San Francisco and near the SFPD headquarters, where I used to go for press conferences when I was a crime reporter. It was a vast parking lot, not far from the stadium where the second-to-last Dead & Co. show was going to start in two hours, and it was full of Deadheads.

The lot is the scene outside every show, known colloquially as Shakedown Street. It’s more or less an open-air drug market, that phrase that gets thrown around a lot to describe other parts of San Francisco; it is also the locus of the vestiges of real hippie culture. There is nothing like it anywhere else. There are vans that have been on the road for months, vans painted with psychedelic mushrooms, vans covered in stickers that say “Make America Grateful Again” and “Thank you Bobby.” People sell T-shirts, an endless array of T-shirts in every imaginable version of tie-dye. People sell quesadillas. People sell nitrous oxide—lots of it; in fact, the unmistakable hiss of nitrous and the constant popping of balloons is one of the most disconcerting features of being outside a Dead show. People sell funny hats. People sell, confusingly, a lot of rocks. I saw a sign next to a big box of rocks that said BUY 1 GET 1 FREE.

Being on the lot is basically just about wandering around and looking at stuff, so that’s what we did. One of my friends wanted to get a new Online Ceramics Dead T-shirt; another one wanted to buy a tiny ceramic mushroom to hold during the concert. My brother and I weaved in and out of some stalls, looking at shirts and stickers that said things like “Not like other girls” and “5-8-1977 was an inside job.”

“There was this apple last night that I was eating and I couldn’t stop eating it, I even ground up the seeds and then I think I was worried that I had arsenic in my body, so I got a bit disturbed during ‘Space,’ ” I heard one guy telling his friend, bent over a camping stove where he was frying some onions and nursing a beer.

Walking into a Dead & Company show is more or less how you imagine it would be: there are nearly forty thousand people converging on a baseball stadium wearing some of the worst outfits you have ever seen in your life. “This is really a lot of different types of white people, huh?” a first-time attendee said as we walked into the show at San Francisco’s Oracle Park (formerly AT&T Park, SBC Global Park, and PacBell Park.) On the street, a white guy with dreadlocks offered us mushrooms. Another white guy with dreadlocks held up a sign that said, “Cash, grass, or ass—I’ll take it all.” A friend, stunned by the famous Northern California fog, bought an ugly tie-dye sweatshirt at a makeshift stand outside the stadium for seventy-eight dollars.

It was the first night of a three-night run of the final shows for this iteration of the Grateful Dead—the last tour ever, the last shows ever, though, as everyone knows, the Grateful Dead has been ending for nearly twenty years. When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, everyone thought that was the end. In 2015, many of the original band members played a tour that was literally called “Fare Thee Well.” And yet, miraculously, it continued. But this time: Bob Weir is seventy-five, and John Mayer, the unlikely force behind this version of the band, has other things to get on to. At the very least, this is probably the last time they’ll ever sell out huge stadiums. So this was a major event that I had flown out from New York to see with five friends. I had been hearing for days that SFO was “like Bonnaroo for Deadheads.” On another friend’s flight in, the pilot told them they were flying over a wildfire in Colorado. “Wow, it’s literally ‘Fire on the Mountain,’ ” someone behind her said.

In line, everyone checked out the scene, craning their necks to see how good other people’s tie-dyes were. One guy was wearing a cape.

“Is that Andy Cohen?” someone asked.

$1.99 Man Made Monsters by Andrea L. Rogers Get This Deal

$1.99 The Iron King by Julie Kagawa Get This Deal

$1.99 When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb Get This Deal

$2.99 Famous In A Small Town by Emma Mills Get This Deal

$1.99 The River Has Teeth by Erica Waters Get This Deal

$2.99 Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask: Young Readers Edition by Anton Treuer Get This Deal

$2.99 Salt and Sugar by Rebecca Carvalho Get This Deal

$1.99 The Great American Dust Bowl by Don Brown Get This Deal

An early-summer, late-afternoon light was catching a porcelain figurine of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus on the windowsill of Johnnie’s Italian Specialties, the twenty-eight-year-old family-owned restaurant in South Philly where, in May, I dialed up my personal hotspot, hoping to get tickets to the Taylor Swift concert taking place in the city later that night. My cheesesteak sub was dry and insufficiently cheesy and entirely beside the point—it was a formality, if a regionally appropriate one, meant to justify my seat at this funky restaurant as my sister and I refreshed four different ticket resale websites waiting for prices to drop. We were not two of the lucky 2.4 million who had gotten tickets to the Eras Tour when they’d gone on sale several months earlier, in a rollout so vexed and disorderly it caused an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department into antitrust violations by Ticketmaster and Live Nation.

At first, this didn’t bother me. I do not have the patience to wait in something called a virtual queue, and also I have a job. So I’d resigned myself to the fact that I would not be attending the Eras Tour, Swift’s 131-show survey of her ten studio albums—which I suppose we now call eras and not albums—and the logical, world-beating end point of her willful evolution from gee-whiz country darling to too-big-to-fail pop supernova. But then, in March, the Eras Tour commenced, and for several weeks thereafter my Twitter feed was overrun with clips from the show, which runs close to three and a half hours, includes forty-four songs, and is structured episodically as a Homeric celebration of Swift’s discography. It looked like the sort of thing I’d regret missing, the premise of a memory I could tell my kids or at least my friends’ kids about. 

Nine days earlier, my sister had texted me to see if I’d be down to drive to Philadelphia from New York the day of the concert on a lark. “Idk how I feel about that,” I wrote back. “Is that a thing?” I am constitutionally risk averse, and the idea of driving there and failing to get tickets was less attractive than not having them at all. But Swift herself once said that nothing safe is worth the drive, and my sister had done her due diligence. On TikTok, she told me, a whisper network of unticketed Swifties were documenting their journeys to whichever city Swift was playing that night, scooping up the remaining tickets at 5 or 6 P.M., when scalpers realized they could not sell them for $2,500 a pop. Not unjustifiably, Swifties get a bad rap. They are defensive and belligerent, boastful about streaming numbers and record sales and tour profits, which is a function of Swift’s own valedictorian disposition. But they are also funny, resourceful, canny creatures of the internet whose parasocial hungers Swift not only treasures but responds to, like a benevolent monarch. 

It was Swiftie plaintiffs who, in righteous indignation at price gouging and incompetence more generally, forced Ticketmaster executives to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year. (It was also Swifties who forced me to witness Amy Klobuchar interpolating the lyrics to “All Too Well” in a pandering screed against the ills of corporate consolidation.) Swifties make Twitter accounts, like @ErasTourResell, to sell available tickets at face value to real fans, thereby keeping them out of the hands of scalpers. “LA SWIFTIES ,” goes one tweet, which is best read in the voice of an auctioneer. “We have a seller …” When Swifties demanded additional tour dates in neglected cities, Swift, who had initially overlooked Singapore, responded with six of them. And on TikTok and other sites, they document and live stream the Eras Tour rigorously for absent fans, so much that I could find out, from an account called @ErasTourUpdates, that Swift changed her costume for the 1989 portion of the concert in Cincinnati—from a beaded lime green top and skirt to an identical set, but in fuchsia—thirty seconds after she appeared on stage.

Péter Esterházy once wrote that Péter Zilahy is the white raven of Hungarian literature who can observe the world each time as if for the first time, always fresh and original. While it’s labeled a novel, The Last Window-Giraffe is essentially uncategorizable, a hippogriff of a creation fashioned from fragments of history, autobiography, and wild invention. How such a wealth of elements—from childhood memories to political atrocities to the poignant evocation of the correspondence between sexual awakening and the deaths of dictators—could be gathered and spun into such a coherent narrative is a kind of aesthetic miracle.

Zilahy uses the Hungarian alphabet to present a wonderful mix of historical facts, poetry, and visual images, an approach inspired by the time he spent in Belgrade in 1996, when citizens took to the streets to protest Slobodan Milošević’s electoral fraud. The Last Window-Giraffe evokes many memories of my own past in the former Yugoslavia. There’s a wizardry in Zilahy’s ability to shrink an entire historical epoch to human scale while at the same time elevating ordinary experience to mythic significance. This is intellectual alchemy of the highest order, executed with wit and compassion. Zilahy can murder a sacred cow and canonize an unknown victim of totalitarianism in a single sentence.

H is for:
három puszi = three kisses
háború = war
harag = anger
halál = death
hatalom = power
híradó = news bulletin
hazudnak = they’re lying

U is for:
ur = space
ur = blank
ur = nothingness

This week’s book censorship news post begins with highlighting the results of the author survey on the financial impact they have experienced due to book bans. Because the results were lengthy, that was put into a separate post which is linked here and in the image below. Go dig into those, then come back to this week’s roundup of book censorship news.

We need more stories highlighting what the nonstop book banning and legislated bigotry are doing to the librarians in these positions. A worthwhile read from a school librarian in Utah.“The number of people filing complaints and appeals on books in Greeley-Evans schools [CO] represents less than 1% of the total number of voters who participated in a District 6 ballot issue late last year.” More journalism like this, too, please. The “culture war” is a fake lead because it is not a culture war. It is a small, minuscule minority creating a lot of nonsense.Stamped will be put back on shelves in Pickens County Schools (SC).Meanwhile in New Hanover County School District (NC), Stamped was challenged then approved. That decision is now being appealed.The Old Lyme Public Library (CT) will keep You Know, Sex: Bodies, Gender Puberty and Other Things and Let’s Talk About it: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships and Being a Human in the teen section of the public library. Where they belong.Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools (NC) continues to hear from Moms for Liberty about the need to ban books throughout the district. Maybe the district should not have invited them for a one-on-one meeting last fall to hear them out. Now Moms think they own the district.“In the waning days of LGBT Pride Month, Clovis City Councilwoman Diane Pearce posted a message on Facebook that she called a ‘public service announcement.’ It warned about LGBT books at the local library.” Here’s your fascism, once again in California.Remember the time a full-grown adult was attempting to break into school libraries in Iredell-Statesville, North Carolina to take photos of the books that she claimed were naughty? (Yes, she’s a Moms member). Well, the district is still dealing with this and turns out, they ban books whenever there is as much as a complaint: “Greg Mueller of Mooresville said he appreciated what progress Mimnaugh and others have made in having books removed from schools in Iredell County but questioned the progress. He proposed that any book that was brought into question by parents be removed from schools while it is evaluated. Superintendent Dr. Jeff James said more than 250 books had been asked to be reviewed by adults. He said books are removed during the evaluation process.” Nice parental grooming of a kid in this one, too.Ludlow School’s board proposed a book ban for the district, and now a Massachusetts senator is trying to step in and stop it.Picture books are not a new target in the book banning effort — they’ve been a big part of it since the beginning of this particular two+ year endeavor. But it’s a worthwhile Washington Post piece regardless, if you’re not paywalled.There is a petition trying to get the librarian who put up a June Pride display at the Athens Public Library (TN) fired from the job.“According to Heger, books like The 57 Bus won’t stop bullying in schools of LGTBQ students, as that is a cultural problem for the school. However, she worries that books like The 57 Bus, which focuses on a non-binary student being set on fire while on a bus and their journey of gender identity, will encourage students to use gender pronouns and potentially identify themselves with the ‘attractive’ LGBTQ lifestyle.” Whether or not The 57 Bus remains a choice book in West Bend High School Junior English classes (WI) will be determined later this month. The complainer doesn’t have kids in the school and doesn’t think the book should even be a *choice* to read. You know, though, not book banning since kids can get the book on Amazon.The Kite Runner is also under fire in the West Bend School District (WI) and yes, our parent without kids in the school is involved.Friends of the Caro Library (MI) are helping raise money to protect the board members who are being pushed for recall. Why are they being recalled, you ask? Because the bigots don’t like that they won’t ban books.After throwing chicken feed at the book review committee, Beaufort County Schools (SC) might not allow the individual to attend more meetings. I don’t know, y’all. One side is defending the rights of LGBTQ+ and BIPOC folks and the other is throwing chicken feed.“A Columbia County judge has sided with the Columbia County School District saying a parent’s opt-out of the school’s sexual education program does not require schools to keep materials related to sexuality out of the hands of her child.” It’s wild. The “we don’t coparent with the government” contingent expects the “government schools” to parent for them. This judge says it does not work that way.Moms for Liberty wants LGBTQ+ books labeled at the Billings Public Library (MT), which is in direct opposition to what libraries do. Libraries do not label beyond (potentially) genre stickers.This is a big deal, given this library’s history, but the Public Library of Enid (OK) will allow an LGBTQ+ history display in October.Bartholomew County Public Library (IN) did a huge audit of their teen section after fielding complaints about the usual suspects, including demands to move some of the teen books to “more appropriate” sections. Turns out, books are where they should be and oh, they don’t have enough LGBTQ+ books there, either.A North Carolina county attempted to take control over their public library. It did not go well, and the reason they wanted to take it over will (absolutely not) shock you: “[C]ommission chairman Jeff Whitson made a motion to begin the process of taking over the library system and making it completely county-operated. He said the purpose was to ensure that there was no bias shown to any religious, political, or ethnic platform. The motion was tabled and sparked a heated debate as many residents believed the motion was in response to the library’s Pride display in June.” (Update: the motion did not pass!).An update on our pal Gavin Downing in Kent, Washington, as he prepares for another school year resisting book bans.Unpregnant will be under review with the Nixa School Board (MO) once again.A new bill in North Carolina is a book banner and public school hater’s dream, wherein leaders can be removed easily and librarians can be prosecuted.I am paywalled for this story, and that’s unfortunate since it’s also (what passes for good) news. The Indian Valley Public Library (PA) will not be defunded over LGBTQ+ books.I had no idea since 2021 that over 20 books had been banned or censored in the Waukesha School District (WI).Under a new proposal in Hempfield Area Schools (PA), who cares about expertise? “Potential new books coming into Hempfield Area School District libraries could first be reviewed by the public before going on school shelves.” Cool.It’s not just the U.S. dealing with all of this. In parts of Canada, it’s been brutal, and that’s been especially true in the South Central Regional Library in Manitoba. They’ve dealt with the crisis actors and the city council just found a solution: appoint some of themselves to the library board to ensure the dirty books aren’t in the kids section. “The City’s resolution instructs their two appointed board members to exert influence as members of the SCRL Board of Directors to create a policy, whereby graphically sexually explicit books be moved from the children’s section to another section of the library as appropriate so that children will not stumble across them, but they remain available to parents who wish to use them as an educational resource.” That’s not how this works.The Oconee County Library Board of Trustees (SC) voted to remove the YA book Flamer from the YA section and move it to the adult section. That…is still censorship.10 of the 30 folks who showed up at the Yankton, South Dakota, public library board meeting spoke about the library’s Pride month display. Most spoke in favor of it. Y’all, keep this up.Finally, let’s go back to Canada for a moment. They released their country’s most banned books of 2022 — noting, too, the largest uptick they’ve seen. Top of the list? Gender Queer. You’ll see some U.S. favorites here and some new ones, sure to start causing crisis preparations from the bigot contingent soon.

In early June, I distributed an author survey to gauge the impact of book bans on authors. The survey specifically sought to look at where or how school and library visit invitations have changed since 2021 — the first year this wave of book bans really caught fire. Are authors seeing their incomes decrease? Are they seeing fewer invites to speak to students out of fear of the content their books include? The results are in.

It is worth noting that this survey had 25 responses. This is significantly more than the agent survey earlier this year, though it is in no way able to represent the population of authors; it can’t even represent the population of authors writing the kinds of books being challenged, censored, and banned right now. The author survey reached an even bigger audience of potential respondents than the agent survey did, and both saw wide distribution through new and legacy industry channels. That said, this array of responses is likely indicative of trends happening more broadly and by those who are writing the kinds of books being targeted.

All survey takers were able to remain anonymous, so commentary will be without attribution. Chances are what was stated, though, represents common themes seen by both the other survey takers and the broader kid lit author world in the U.S. It is worth noting that open-ended questions yielded much smaller response pools, evident as you read through the results.

Because some of the questions were cut off in the graphics produced from the survey, I have duplicated them in full above the response.

Due to the length of this survey, note that this week’s book censorship news roundup is in a separate post. You can access it here, and you’ll also be linked to that post at the conclusion of this one.

Summer is in full swing — in some parts dangerously so — and if you need a break from the heat/terrible air quality but want to feel connected to others, may I suggest a book club? All but one of the below book clubs are virtual and they offer the flexibility of participating as little or as much as you’d like, which is always a win-win. Plus, you can always just peruse this as a list to select your next read from and/or pile more books onto your to-be-read list.

This month we didn’t have multiple book clubs pick the same book, ending that fun streak, but one book club did pick the book chosen twice last month, this month! A sign of a perfect book club choice? Yes, yes it is! (Spoiler: it’s the bright yellow one!)

Once again we did have a month with great picks for all reading tastes! If you’re looking for nonfiction and memoir you have different options. There are two romance books, one for a Latine romance book club pick and one for a Jewish book club pick. A sci-fi that recently made waves on Twitter, just before Twitter really started imploding (talk about timing!). A contemporary that flips the romance genre question of “will they” into “should they,” along with a humorous contemporary summer read. Thriller fans have a book, literary fans have two options, and there’s a popular contemporary that reads like a literary thriller. Enjoy all the great choices!