Search Results for: The Nation

How the Self-Publishing Industry Changed, Between My First and Second Novels

Photo: Nicole Dieker

As of this writing, my self-published novel The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 2: 2004–2016 is currently ranked #169,913 out of the more than one million Kindle books sold on Amazon. When Biographies Vol. 2 launched at the end of May, it ranked #26,248 in Kindle books and #94,133 in print books. At one point my book hit #220 in the subcategory “Literary Fiction/Sagas.”

So far, Biographies Vol. 2 has sold 71 Kindle copies and 55 paperbacks, which correlates to about $360 in royalties.

I know what you’re thinking, and you’ve probably been thinking it since you saw the words “self-published.” But no, those sales numbers aren’t because my books are terrible—and I didn’t self-publish because my books were terrible either. (It’s a long story, but it has to do with an agent telling me that I could rewrite Biographies to make it more marketable to the traditional publishing industry, or I could keep it as an “art book” that would be loved by a select few.) Last year’s The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 1: 1989–2000 was named a Library Journal Self-E Select title; Vol. 2 was just selected as a Kirkus Reviews featured indie, with the blurb “A shrewdly unique portrait of everyday America.” I regularly get emails from readers telling me how much my books have meant to them, and how they couldn’t put their copies down.

So. I could tell you a story that makes The Biographies of Ordinary People sound like a triumphant success, and I could also tell you that in its first year of publication, Biographies Vol. 1 sold 382 ebooks and 157 paperbacks, earning $1,619.28 in royalties. Read more…

City on a Hill

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Leslie Kendall Dye | Longreads | June 2018 | 11 minutes 2,944 words)

 

At the top of Riverdale, at the top of the Bronx, there is a city on a hill. The city exists within a single building; there are single rooms with no locks, each with a bed, a dresser, and — if the resident’s family provides one — a television set with which to while away the hours. Time is measured by the same clock as it is in other cities, but here it curves and collapses, compresses yet languorously stretches. Once a week there is a hairdresser and a manicurist, too. It is lovely — and dreadful. You can visit the citizens here, and you are free to leave when you are ready, if freedom is measured by the movement of one’s feet. My mother lives in this building, which is a nursing home. We signed the contract for her just last month, in what might have been human blood.

The city-building overlooks the Hudson River, which today glimmers silver under a portentous sky. It’s spring by the calendar, but winter has persisted in the Northeast. I trudge west from Riverdale Avenue bundled into my down coat, the wind biting at my neck. I like to pretend that my mother is expecting me.

She has lived there only a few days. I am acquainting myself with the place every time I visit. She lives on one of the dementia floors, the medium security floor, with other people who are social and display a level of intellectual competence that affords them the illusion of freedom — they do not require help from aides with dressing and bathing, for example, and they may choose where to sit at dinner.

She lives on one of the dementia floors, the medium security floor, with other people who are social and display a level of intellectual competence that affords them the illusion of freedom…

There is a code to gain entry to the elevator, and another to make the elevator move. We are asked not to let the residents know these numbers, although this seems to miss the point; no one who lives here could retain the numbers long enough to use them. Still, I take the piece of paper on which the nurse has written the codes and stash it deep in my coat pocket, checking it discreetly before punching in the numbers.

The unit has a hospital floor plan, which casts a gloom over the space, a reminder that this is a ward, not a home. Still, the idea of a central nurses’ station affords some comfort — someone is just down the hall in case of emergency. My mother has one endless emergency here — her own urgent need to leave.

She looks up eagerly when I cross the threshold bearing my weekly gifts — this time, a CD player, some photos to hang, cookies, fresh underwear and socks. Everything she owns must be labeled; dementia-floor residents can be found in each other’s clothing routinely. “You have to have a sense of humor about it,” my mother’s social worker tells me.


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Her room has a river view. I wonder what it’s like not to know which body of water it is that one sees through the glass; not to know that the sun will set over this water because one is facing west; not to know which way the bathroom is or what time it is or how to find the phone; not to remember the combination of numbers that will allow you to reach your children; to know you have children, but not to remember their names.

“It’s so large,” my mother says, as we stroll down the hall, gazing at the paintings on the walls. We take the elevator to the mezzanine, where we can get some food. We walk down another long hall, passing a small pool, a gym, a spa. “Isn’t this nice, Mom?” I ask, and she nods agreeably.

I hear music, an accordion bleating out a melody in a minor key.

Those were the days, my friend
We’d thought they’d never end
We’d sing and dance forever and a day
We’d live the life we choose
We’d thought we’d never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way.

I smile; it is comically, tragically apropos for a nursing home. Still, I guide my mother toward the music, which is both lively and disturbing, as though accompanying the final sequence in a horror film.

We arrive at a small ballroom in which a crowd of mostly wheelchair-bound seniors sit, nodding to the music, enlivened and demonstrating as much to the height of their ability. It reminds me of bar mitzvahs I attended long ago — the wall-to-wall carpeting, the tinny music reverberating in the stale, enclosed space. I turn my head toward the door and notice a bird cage. It’s actually a glass enclosure, in which parakeets and cockatoos chirp and flit from one end to the other.

“Let’s find the café, Mom,” I say, and she replies that she will follow me anywhere.

I direct her out of the ballroom. We walk until at last I see sunlight. They call it the River Cafe; it looks like a bodega. Here we can buy cookies and toiletries and coffee. Booths line a glass wall affording a dazzling view of the water.

“Look at the view!” I have been saying this a lot today, as if the sight of the river were recompense for her confinement.

“Yes, it’s lovely,” she replies, “It’s very nice.”

She is uneasy, asking me constantly if after this tour I will be taking her “out of here.”

“Look at the view!” I have been saying this a lot today, as if the sight of the river were recompense for her confinement.

Yes, I tell her, we are going to my sister’s house, it’s not far at all, we are walking there.

“Thank god,” she says. “ I can’t tell you how happy I was to see you walk in.”

* * *

Almost no new memories imprint; I am struck by the specific details she retains: my entrance into her room, what she felt like at that instant, how desperate she felt just before. Will this crystallized moment be sent down the pipe to long-term memory? Or will she have it only for today?

We buy a cookie then leave the café. On the way to the elevator, a small room set up like a museum alcove catches my eye. Pickles and Egg Cream reads a sign overhead. It’s an exhibit of dioramas in which a woman named Ruby G. Strauss has recreated scenes from her parents’ years on the Lower East Side. I peer into a scene of passengers exiting the subway stop at Broadway and 14th Street, another of Strauss’s grandmother’s garden in summer, wedged between two tenements, a line of clothes drying above children skipping rope and a man in a straw hat reading the paper. There are dozens of little figures holding tiny props: a man drinking wine by a cathedral radio in his parlor, a bride and groom on their wedding day, a grandmother wearing wiry glasses, knitting.

Like the parakeets, the dioramas are too easy a metaphor. Life under glass. Life observed through glass. Life imprisoned within glass walls. I pull my mother out of the alcove. Her eyesight has been failing, so for her the exhibit is a blur.

I punch the code in and the elevator arrives. We emerge on the first floor and exit through the lobby, passing a collection of dolls made in the images of American First Ladies. I can see my mother’s reflection — her long coat and dark hair — in the glass that encases the dolls, moving swiftly and enthusiastically toward the lobby door.

A shock of cold wind hits as it slides open.

“It’s really a nice place,” I say. “In spring all these trees will bloom and they have barbecues in the garden.”

“Yes, I’m so lucky,” my mother says. “Are we leaving now?”

As we walk down the hill toward the guard booth, I think of an Isaac Asimov book I read in my youth. In Caves of Steel, he envisions a futuristic city complex where New York City once stood. It is entirely enclosed, without a drop of fresh air seeping into its midst, contained under metal domes.

The air is so qualitatively different outside the walls of the pavilion in which my mother now lives, which hums with the electrical energy of a well-run hotel. Its seamless wall-to-wall carpet obliterates any hint of nature, the scent of cateria food permeates the first floor corridors, the ring of elevator cars creates a perpetual dinging soundtrack in the lobby.

A siren goes off, as though a dog had jumped a security perimeter. It’s my mother’s electronic bracelet, which they’ve attached to prevent her from wandering off the property. I negotiate our departure without alerting my mother to this indignity.

We proceed eastward on a paved path. Alongside the path runs a tall metal fence that separates us from some tan, patchy grass — the sort that works as visual shorthand for the ravages of winter. I’m breathing better now, as is my mother, who has all morning complained of agitation.

“I was so glad when I saw you in the doorway,” she says again, as we walk into the wind toward Riverdale Avenue. We cross it and as we do, seem to travel through a time portal. The red-brick houses are narrow and built right next to one another; they have small porches, and I see a window sign declaring that We are all made in God’s image. There is a cozy, nostalgic compression to the neighborhood, some sense of Americana that is absent from the busy streets of Manhattan, where I live. I see errant crocuses defying the angry winter wind and a daffodil or two, flags, rusty porch swings, and broken children’s wagons on tiny front yards.

“Where are we going?” my mother asks.

“To your daughter’s house,” I reply. “We’re almost there.”

“That’s right,” my mother says. “I know I have to go back tonight, to the place, but I don’t want to think about it now.” She smiles and plays with the electronic bracelet on her arm, unaware of what it does.

I bring up the river, again, out of habit.

“There’s a beautiful view from your room, Mom,” I say, finding my own smile sinister.

“Yes — ” she starts. “I’m so lucky.”

Another universe unfolds inside my sister’s house. It is organized along the principle of family: children’s bedrooms, toys organized by age appropriateness and size, a kitchen stocked with packaged soups and treats young children like. Still, the wreckage of six children and two dogs is everywhere in evidence: chewed pillows, fights underway, dirty dishes on the table, crayons on the floor. My mother settles on the couch after asking if she can be of any help. She smiles at me, looks around for my sister, asks where the house is. I am not sure how to answer. I tell her it is down the street from where she lives, but this means almost nothing to her. We are supposed to give her something to do, something to occupy her hands and provide her with a sense of her necessity; I have read that all humans need this. Sometimes we do find tasks, but sometimes we lack creativity and tell her she should just relax. She cannot relax; there is nothing relaxing about perpetual confusion. She asks again if she can help. I ask her to pick up the crayons. I find later that she’s put them in the dishwasher.

Noam, who is 7, kisses his grandmother when it’s time for me to walk her back. He looks at her as though in love, and I wish this were all she needed, all anyone needed. I assure her that she will return to this house soon. Right now, it’s time to go. She sighs; I hear a whistle in her breath that betrays more than passing reluctance.

The clouds have drowned in the ink of a night sky; I sing a familiar tune and hold my mother’s hand as we walk back to the nursing home. I assure her I’ll be back soon. It jangles my heart, this wrongness, this dropping off, this dislocation of a family member, the exile imposed by decline. The lobby murmurs with electricity, the First Lady dolls stare expectantly from behind their glass.

It jangles my heart, this wrongness, this dropping off, this dislocation of a family member, the exile imposed by decline.

I punch in the code and we ascend in silence to the second floor. My mother suddenly squeezes my hand and tells me she loves me.

The air in here is stale as ever. Both of us feel the panic return.

I have an impulse to seize my mother’s arm and run. I want to bring her home and put her in bed and sing to her until she falls asleep. Instead, I pick out a nightgown and pat her head. She tries not to cry.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Mom,” I offer.

“Will you?” she asks.

And I retreat — from her, from her pain, from mine, from the city on the hill.

I punch in the code and the humming box takes me down. First floor. Past the First Ladies. Out into the night air. Onto the BXM2 bus, which will carry me home to Manhattan.

* * *

Reality is a a series of universes with membranes loose and undulating. Where does one end and the other begin? Is there a wall between the perceptions of the “demented” and the rest of us, who retain enough memory to support a more continuous vision of our histories, our days, to support a logic dependent on past and future? Or is it more a window, or more alarming yet, a swinging door?

All realities exist near porous borders — for example, my mind has flown into fantasy as I mentally retrace in words the cavernous, tiny universe of my mother’s nursing home complex. I’ve fashioned it into a cave of steel, in the image of another reality, stolen from within the pages of fiction. The path between it and my sister’s house is now a time machine of my own construction, my sister’s street is a world built of images I see in the past of a country in a time before I was born. My mother merely wants to know whose house we are visiting; her “sane” daughter, her guardian, is dreaming of the way in which streets, houses, concrete walkways, and riverside high-rise complexes splinter and spiderweb outward into separate communities from the moment humans began interacting with time. Which of the two of us, my mother or I, is more connected to reality as we define it as an everyday convenience? Surely my mother’s questions are more practical, more connected to pragmatic concerns, than mine, which are based on hallucinatory impressions of time and space. I have fallen somewhere on this visit, stumbled and slipped into fantasy, allowed the home that keeps my mother safe to drive me close to madness. I am not sure where anything begins or ends anymore, not sure that anything does.

The bus is turning off the Major Deegan Expressway now, it rolls steadily down Fifth Avenue. The trees on either side, illuminated by a flush of light from a streetlamp, are bare and white and wild-limbed against the black sky. They incline toward the street, forming an archway under which we sail. There’s the time portal again, coming into view: the buildings lining the avenue, stately and majestic, are alive with the ghosts of the 19th century, one can see the horses and carriages clopping underneath the arboreal canopy, one can smell the pipe smoke and the dirt, see the women in full skirts hurrying across this boulevard two centuries ago.

How easy it is to slip into reverie, to slip across the boundary from one reality to the other, one fancy to the next, especially in this city. New York is known for its boundaries between rich and poor, but also for the suddenness with which the neighborhoods change. Swank lobbies with doormen line one block, graffiti-worn bodegas and chain link fences line the next. This is how fast Madison Avenue shifts between 94th and 96th Street.

My mother is confined in her cave of steel, trapped within the boundaries of her forgetfulness. I am trapped in my own universe of half dreams and meditations. Her worries are immediate and connected to the hardness of her reality, mine are existential, free to float philosophically above her everyday concerns.

We walk the halls of her city on the hill together, unavailable to each other, trapped under different kinds of glass.

My bus drops me at my West Side stop; I exit to the sight of hot dog carts and the scent of park-bench smokers, to the music of barking dogs and basketballs bouncing. Though now walking a familiar route home, the sensation of wandering does not abate. Maybe it is merely the tableaux of street life shifting and sliding past that evokes my dizzy sense of dislocation. I think it is something more, though — I walk as if chased by the wind, or worse. I slow down, speed up, ascend the stairs to my apartment; still I am pursued. I go to bed and dream of the city on the hill. It is now a castle in which old people turn young, wrinkles are smoothed into satin flesh, the people dance and flick their skirts and sing.

We walk the halls of her city on the hill together, unavailable to each other, trapped under different kinds of glass.

A river runs past this castle, and boats too, in which the people make their escape. I do not see which boat my mother takes, or who ferries it, but when I return for our next visit she is not waiting on her bed for me, gazing at an unknown vista. I am so very glad — when I arrive at her threshold — that this time I do not see her there. She has crossed the perimeter between her world and my reverie, traversed the undulating boundary between reality and fancy, between mother and daughter, between dementia and freedom.

But this — this is only in my dream.

* * *

Leslie Kendall Dye is an actress and freelance writer based in New York City.

* * *

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross
Illustrator: Katie Kosma

On Saving the Cuban Crocodile from American Invasion

The Cuban crocodile, C. rhombifer (Getty Images)

At Hakai Magazine, Shanna Baker reports on the ongoing bid to preserve C. rhombifer, the breed of Cuban crocodile beloved of Fidel Castro, who was known to send living and embalmed versions of the animal to allies around the world. The Cuban croc is endangered, not only due to shrinking habitat, but also to hybridization as its gene pool gets polluted by natural encounters with the bigger, shyer American crocodile.

Beside a spit of land jutting into a swampy enclosure, a female crocodile breaks the waterline, the bony ridges on her back jagged like an electrocardiogram. Her eyes track six sweat-soaked men standing in a haphazard semicircle, gripping poles twice their own height, as mosquitos orbit their straw hats. Another man works quickly with a hoe, leveling the dried grasses of her nest and chewing up the earth until he finds her unborn brood, laid just three days ago. The crocodile thrashes and lunges forward, but two men raise their weapons, ready to deliver a hard thump to the snout if she approaches.

She sinks back as the man in the middle of the mob loads her few dozen eggs plus a second set from a nearby nest into a plastic pail, cushioning them between layers of dirt. At the top, he places four last eggs—the rejects—each the size of a small mango. They feel like unpolished marble and all bear a sizable dent. The tiny would-be Cuban crocodiles (Crocodylus rhombifer) inside are goners—the membranes are too damaged—but the others are destined for an incubation room, where air conditioners humming round the clock will hopefully hold them at a steady temperature. If all goes as planned, in 75 days or so, hatchlings will emerge and help move the needle on C. rhombifer’s prospects for survival.

Conserving the Cuban croc was one of Fidel Castro’s first priorities after he steamed into power in 1959. Just months into his rule, he ordered the creation of the Criadero de cocodrilos, Ciénaga de Zapata—or Zapata Swamp Captive Breeding Facility—a cluster of ponds, rows of concrete-block pens, and a couple of narrow one-story buildings split into modest offices and workspaces for staff two and a half hours south of Havana. Castro always had a predilection for wild spaces and things, says environmental historian Reinaldo Funes-Monzote of the University of Havana. Whether he cherished endemic species because they fit with his hypernationalistic sensibilities, or he related to their untamed energy, or he was just enlightened to the inherent value of wildlife is a guess, though crocodiles must have become a point of pride for him at some stage—he eventually developed a habit of gifting them, either living or embalmed, to foreign allies.

The Cuban is bolder and hunts during the day. It has a stubby snout, a reputation for jumping, and a tendency to walk with its belly high off the ground. The American is bigger, more apt to hide, searches for prey at night, sports dark bands on its back and sides, and has a long, pointed snout and extra webbing on its hind toes. The differences are as distinct as red from blue.

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Puma’s Ploy to Become Relevant in Basketball Again

BROOKLYN, NY - JUNE 18: PUMA sneakers on display at the PUMA Hoops HQ kickoff where Walt "Clyde" Frazier signs the first ever life long contract with PUMA on June 18, 2018 in Brooklyn. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for PUMA)

There were few players as dominant in college basketball this past season as Deandre Ayton, a 7-foot-1 center who played his freshman year at the University of Arizona before declaring for the NBA draft. The native of the Bahamas was an imposing force and, as such, will likely be selected as the top pick in the 2018 NBA draft, which will be held at the Barclays Center this Thursday.

It’ll be a historic moment: If he is chosen by the Phoenix Suns with the first pick, Ayton will become the fourth international player in the past six years chosen as the number one overall pick. But even if he’s chosen as the second pick, Ayton will still make history — in a shocking turn, the center spurned Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour to sign a four-year multi-million sneaker endorsement deal with Puma, a company that hasn’t been relevant in the sneaker game for decades.

When asked by Bleacher Report about the ramifications of signing with a company whose last NBA sneaker endorsement ended in arbitration (Vince Carter signed with Puma in 1998, only to back out of his contract a year later, claiming Puma failed to deliver a signature sneaker as well as a sneaker that fit properly; he had to pay $13.5 million after the arbitrator ruled Carter had indeed breached his contract), Ayton said, “That’s a problem. That’s going to catch everybody’s eyes. That’s a huge step for Puma, too.” Read more…

The Urban Crisis of Affluence

Skyscrapers
Photo by Tim Clayton / Corbis via Getty Images

After three decades living in and around New York City, I, too, am leaving to make way for the only people the city is still welcoming: billionaires who don’t live here.

In Harper’s Magazine, Kevin Baker writes at length in “The Death of a Once Great City” about how the few who can afford to build and buy in New York don’t want to live here, either. In one affluent twenty-block corridor, “almost one apartment in three sits empty for at least ten months a year.” A couple of neighborhoods south, developers at an eighty-three-unit luxury condo were recently offering “to throw in two studio apartments and two parking spots for any buyer willing to shell out $48 million for the building’s 7,000-square foot penthouse.” That’s five empty things for the price of one empty thing, in case you’d like to park dozens of millions of dollars in an investment property that’s big enough to fit dozens of homeless families.

Drawing from Michael Greenberg’s incisive piece on the city’s housing emergency last summer in The New York Review of Books, Baker connects the dots between empty penthouses and empty storefronts, decrying how “all that our urban leaders, in New York and elsewhere, Democratic as well as Republican, have been able to come up with is one scheme after another to invite the rich in.”

As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. It is approaching a state where it is no longer a significant cultural entity but the world’s largest gated community, with a few cupcake shops here and there.

The new rich infesting the city are barely here. They keep a low profile, often for good reason, and rarely stick around. They manufacture nothing and run nothing, for the most part, but live off fortunes either made by or purloined from other people—sometimes from entire nations. The New Yorker noted in 2016 that there is now a huge swath of Midtown Manhattan, from Fifth Avenue to Park Avenue, from 49th Street to 70th Street, where almost one apartment in three sits empty for at least ten months a year. New York today is not at home. Instead, it has joined London and Hong Kong as one of the most desirable cities in the world for “land banking,” where wealthy individuals from all over the planet scoop up prime real estate to hold as an investment, a pied-à-terre, a bolt-hole, a strongbox.

A triplex at the forthcoming 220 Central Park South will reportedly be sold for $200 million, and a four-story apartment at the same address is priced to move at $250 million. These would be the largest home sales ever recorded anywhere in the United States.

Who spends this sort of money for an apartment? The buyers are listed as hedge fund managers, foreign and domestic; Russian oligarchs; Chinese apparel and airline magnates. And increasingly, to use a repeated Times term, a “mystery buyer,” often shielded by a limited liability company.

This is not the benevolent “gentrification” that Michael Bloomberg seemed to have had in mind but something more in the tradition of the king’s hunting preserves, from which local peasants were banned even if they were starving and the king was far away.

There are now so many of the supertalls gathered so closely together that they threaten to leave the lower sections of Central Park, the only true architectural marvel to be seen here, in shadow for much of the year. One simulation found that the shadows of the highest towers may knife a mile into the park on the winter solstice.

When the journalist Warren St. John protested against these towers that block the sun and literally leave children shivering in the park, he pointed out that the highest supertall apartments—when they are occupied at all—house maybe a few hundred people, as opposed to the 40 million individuals who use Central Park every year. But this seems to be the calculation on which New York now operates.

Even for those who can afford the new New York, it is unclear how much they actually like it or maintain any ability to shape it to their tastes. What is the point, after all, of paying a fortune to live in a city that is more and more like everywhere else?

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The Camouflage Artist: Two World Wars, Two Loves, and One Great Deception

'Grumble' York, July 1941, Retreat from Dunkirk by John Churchill

Mary Horlock | Excerpt adapted from Joseph Gray’s Camouflage: A Memoir of Art, Love and Deception | Unbound | September 2018 | 22 minutes (5,778 words)

This story starts with a picture: a vast turquoise sky, an endless yellow beach, a mother and her child playing in the sand.

My grandmother lifts a trembling hand and points towards the smallest figure.

“That is me.”

She now has a room measuring nine feet by five. There isn’t much wall space, so the picture hangs in the corridor outside, beside the sign: “No.18: Maureen Barclay.”

Maureen Barclay is a widow and there are many here. Some don’t know where they are, nor do they remember the lives they have lived. Maureen is different, she remembers plenty. But with this blessing comes a curse: the older she becomes, the more she worries what she might soon forget. She has moved into a nursing home quite by her own choice, but as she downsizes, reducing her life to the essentials, the more she is stripping back memories, the memories embedded in clothes, objects, papers and pictures.

There simply isn’t room for them here.

The only solution is to pass them on to the people she trusts. She has given me many things over the years — her love and time above all else — but now she surrenders a most treasured possession. It is a pencil-drawn self-portrait of her father and my great-grandfather, Joseph Gray. This is the man who first painted that small child playing on the beach.

Joseph Gray is an artist most people have never heard of, but for much of my early life he was the only artist I’d ever heard of. His paintings filled all the rooms of my grandparents’ flat and much of my own family home. Smoke-filled streets and blitzed churches lined our staircase, thickly painted still lifes crowded in corners, restless seas churned over each mantelpiece. While the houses of my friends contained candy-colored Impressionist prints or tastefully anonymous landscapes, we had this curious mix of styles and subjects, all courtesy of an artist I’d never even met.

But at least I knew what he looked like. I would stare for hours at this pencil-drawn self-portrait: darkly piercing eyes under hooded lids, a wide curving nose, a proud, rounded jaw. With a crumpled hat pulled low on his head Joseph Gray stood straight and returned my gaze. Now that’s what an artist should look like, I thought.

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Looking for a Greener Death

An aquamation unit. Photo via bioresponsefuneral.com.

Aquamation, a method of body disposal that uses lye to dissolve muscles and organs — basically, anything that isn’t bone or tooth — is more environmentally-friendly than cremation and has a growing number of supporters who want it for themselves or their loved ones. Right now, though, it’s difficult to access and is only legal in a handful of states. As Emily Atkin’s story in The New Republic reveals, there are several groups with a vested interest in keeping it largely illegal, and they’re not afraid to use inflammatory rhetoric to get their way.

Representative Dick Hamm’s speech made national news that day, and not only because of his business interest in keeping human aquamation illegal in Indiana. “We’re going to put [dead bodies] in acid and just let them dissolve away and then we’re going to let them run down the drain out into the sewers and whatever,” Hamm said, comparing the process to “flushing” a loved one. This wasn’t accurate. Aquamation uses lye, not acid, and similar fluids are flushed down the drain during the embalming process. But Hamm’s hyperbole was effective. Though he was the only lawmaker to speak against the bill, it failed in a 34-59 vote.

The idea that aquamation is unnatural or gross or even immoral has impeded its adoption in other states. A bill to re-legalize it in New Hampshire, where it had been legal for two years before being repealed, was rejected in 2009 after lawmakers gave speeches similar to Hamm’s. “I don’t want to send a loved one to be used as fertilizer or sent down the drain to a sewer treatment plant,” Republican John Cebrowski said. His Republican colleague Mike Kappler added that “he didn’t want to drive by a sewage lagoon where a relative’s liquid remains would wind up.”

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Old In Art School

(FluxFactory/Getty)

Nell Painter | Old In Art School | Counterpoint | June 2018 | 14 minutes (3,906 words)

Curiosity in my regard, and there was a lot of it, didn’t only come from inside Mason Gross, for generally the kids were cool with whatever. Curiosity came from people of my generation in my soon to be former existence. They regarded my new life, my adventure, in the words of some, my “journey,” with envy and hesitation. They identified with my break for freedom but feared their academic or lawyerly selves had already quashed their inner Beyoncé. They wondered if they, too, could leave dutiful, controlled professional personas and fling themselves into a new, hyper-saturated, Technicolor — no, RBG color-coded — artistic life of creativity and apparent abandon. I had yearned like that before actually walking away. Professing admiration for my bravery, my friends asked how I did it and hoped I would send back a report.

Why do something different? Why start something new? Why did I do it? What made me think I could begin anew in an entirely different field from history, where, truth be told, I had made a pretty good reputation? Was it hard leaving a chaired professorship at Princeton? I didn’t think so. For a long time, my answers, even to myself, were simple — too simple by far.

I said, because I wanted to.

Because I could.

I knew from my mother I could do it.

My smart, small, intense, beautiful, disciplined little mother, Dona Irvin, administrator to author, held the key to my confidence. To a very great extent, she still does. The so much more of myself beyond my sex, race, and age that I cherish is rooted in my family, in my father the gregarious bohemian, who had taught me to draw decades ago, but even more, in my mother, who starting over at sixty-five, blossomed as an older woman, transforming herself into a creator in her own right after a lifetime as a shyly dutiful wife and mother. As an older woman, she cast off the strictures of a lifetime — well, some of them — and took to wearing red or white with her dark skin and taking the bus overnight to play slot machines in Reno.

My mother had never written a book before 65. She had started her career as a school administrator late, after the civil rights movement opened opportunities for an educated black woman, and she had grown professionally. She overcame crippling shyness whose stutter made the telephone her monster. At a liberating feminist retreat at Asilomar, near Monterey, she reclaimed her own name, Dona, after decades of letting other people correct her. Yes, people tried to correct her pronunciation of her own name and talk her into accepting the more easily recognizable “Donna.” At the Asilomar retreat, she put a stop to that and made people call her by her own name. And she started writing in earnest.

Always a terrific writer of letters and reports, she’d never attempted a book. After Asilomar, she found steel within to pull it off.

She devoted ten years to research and publishing her first book, The Unsung Heart of Black America, about the middle-class black people she knew as close, long-term friends in the United Methodist church we attended in the 1950s and early 1960s in Oakland, a work the fine and generous historian John Hope Franklin blurbed.

It took me years to sense the bravery, the sturdy determination her metamorphosis demanded, for she was tougher than I could see during her lifetime. I knew she delved deep to express herself with unadorned honesty. Hard for a woman. Doubly hard for a black woman. Triply hard for a black woman of a class and a generation never wanting to let them (meaning, mainly, white people) catch even a sidelong glimmering of your doubts.

Suppressing doubt and never washing dirty linen in public came naturally to my mother. A public that was black and wore the beloved faces of her friends awaited my mother’s writing as an upstanding black person. That public’s expectation of her as a black author discouraged her speaking as an individual whose identity exceeded race. She felt that pressure and wrote her first book as a black woman, never losing sight of race in America. Yet there was more to her.

It took her ten more years to write and publish her frank and funny memoir, I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old. Just pause for a moment and imagine the guts and good humor she needed to use that title, to admit to looking good, and to write the word “old” and apply it to herself.

I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old.

People used to say that to her all the time, and now they’re saying it to me.

In her memoir, she went on to claim herself as a unique individual, racialized, but with much more to her than race. She wrote as a daughter of two parents in conflict on the most intimate level. The conflict stayed within the range of ordinary human misbehavior — the usual adultery and betrayal — but talking about that exceeded the vocabulary of race alone. Hard to do in the USA, because it’s hard to describe black humanity beyond race and so easy, practically an automatic response, to interpret a claim of individuality as treason to blackness. It’s as though individuality, the pride of white Americans, belongs only to them; as though a black woman speaking as an individual must be backing away from blackness. My mother had to find words to claim both uniqueness and blackness. But find those words she did. Dona was working on a website about vigorous old people of many races when she died at ninety-one, not at all ready to leave.

Looking at her, identifying with her when I was 64, I figured, hell, I could do that. I could do something new in the quarter-century or more still before me, even starting from close to scratch. My mother’s example made me think I could lay down one life and pick up a new one.

***

I had been a youthful artist, and for years I carried a sketchbook and drew all the time. I was still drawing when I lived in Ghana with my parents in the 1960s. These three drawings, pencil on paper, were in my sketchbooks there.

Ghana gave my Bay Area eyes, squinting into a bright blue sky, a whole new palette, a landscape and architecture and people in clothes and rioted textures and colors. Something grew on every surface: bushes, flowers, or mold, or all of it all at once. The California Bay Area that I had left was a beautiful, but a eucalyptus gray place, foggy in the morning, dryly sunny in the day, with mostly light-colored people.

In Ghana, I moved through a humid world of tropical contrasts and color-wheel hues. The dirt was red, the trees and grass blue-green. White buildings, red tiled roofs. Red-orange bougainvillea climbing whitewashed buildings and cascading over fences and walls, some topped with menacing shards of broken brown glass or black wrought-iron spikes testifying to class tensions that barricaded the wealthy against the grasping poor. Together, this colorful landscape and the very black people in white and spectacular clothing altered my vision of everyday life.

In Ghana, I taught French in the language school and gave the news in French on Ghana Radio for a year. I can still hear the drums

Boom boom boom      Boom  Boom

announcing “Ghana calling!” I began graduate study in pre-colonial African history at the Institute of African Studies before a coup d’état deposing Kwame Nkrumah ended his nascent African socialism and sent us Afro-Americans, including Maya Make (later Maya Angelou) to Egypt, to Europe, and for us Irvins, home to California.

I completed my MA in African history at UCLA, having previously discovered a love of history during my junior year abroad at the University of Bordeaux. After UCLA a year of rattlebrained, youthful follies too embarrassing to mention, I ended up at Harvard for a Ph.D. in history. I quit smoking. I wrote a dissertation that became my first book, published by — ahem — Alfred A. Knopf. Many books and professorships at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Princeton University followed.

I was a whiz kid, tenured and promoted at Penn in three years and promoted to full professor at Chapel Hill in another three. In the early days of my career, I never questioned my ability to do well in my field. I loved history, loved research, loved writing — I still love history, love research, love writing. I published books at a regular pace: Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1976), The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South (1979), Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (1986), Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol (1996), Southern History Across the Color Line (2002), Creating Black Americans: African American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present (2006), and the Penguin Classic Editions of Narrative of Sojourner Truth and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. And there were fellowships (Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, &c.), scholarly societies (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Antiquarian Society, &c.), and honorary doctorates (Dartmouth, Yale, &c.).

I don’t want this to sound effortless, for it was all a lot of work, a hell of a lot of dedicated work. Good work, I mean, work that felt good to me, for writing history gave me enormous pleasure. If you want to see the whole panoply of achievement, check out my website, www.nellpainter.com or look at my Facebook page. Over the years, though, images made their way into my writing of history.

Visual art’s gravitational field had renewed its pull decades before my mother had reinvented herself as a writer. Still, I cannot shrug off my change of field as simply a matter of time. It took place step by step, as I was writing history.

My history writing tugged me toward art over the years. I used a photograph I had taken as the frontispiece of my second book, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson, and I wrote about the photograph as a meaningful image, not merely an illustration. Then came the “Truth in Photographs” chapter in my fourth book, Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol, on Truth’s self-fashioning through photographs. I spent hour after hour preparing that chapter in the abundance of Princeton’s Marquand Art History Library, where the art books fill four levels and you can sit comfortably for hours, with the history and theory of photography. In Marquand I learned the rhetoric of the image and critical seeing.

I illustrated Creating Black Americans with fine art. Though it’s a narrative history, Creating Black Americans gave me an introductory course in African American art history. There was, I discovered, more good art by black artists than I could ever cram into one book, even limiting the art to subjects bearing on history. None — okay, very few — of those artists figured in the art history I would study in art school.

The books I wrote weren’t art history, but each one took me beyond text into new visual archives. I loved working with images; I loved learning new history and new artists. This was not like my first undergraduate experience in art.

***

Back in the 1960s I had studied art at Berkeley, had been an art major and drawn a couple of covers for the campus humor magazine. My art major ended with a C in sculpture, a C I earned by not doing any work. Why should I have to work at sculpture, I reckoned like the kid I was, because talent should insure success. I saw talent as everything, therefore exerting myself would make no difference. What kind of reasoning is that? Dumb kid reasoning. I didn’t know how to work on learning sculpture, and I didn’t know any professional artists to show me a way. On the other hand, my academic family applauded my writing. There ended my story in art for decades. Except for occasional sketching and knitting, I put down the visual and wrote a very great deal of text. Eventually, my books returned me to art, and once back in images, I concluded, Yes, I think I could stay in the world of pictures. Let me test this out.

During my last year teaching at Princeton I took two introductory painting classes. Introductory painting came after my regular teaching and kept me in Princeton to 10 PM. After that, I’d get home to Newark in the middle of the night. My generous Princeton colleague Valerie Smith let me stay over at her house and sweetly bought one of my first drawings. At first, I didn’t know to photograph my work, so Valerie’s drawing has disappeared from my files. The office of another Princeton colleague, Edmund White, was next to my painting studio. He bought my very first painting, my attempt to depict a set-up in various surfaces and shades of red and yellow, shiny, matte, opaque and translucent, saturated and toned down. The reflective red hat contrasted with two drapes, one also reflective but mixed with blue, the other with a pattern that fractured in the folds of the cloth. The bright yellow shopping bag in front combined a shiny surface and a broken pattern.

In this first Princeton class I painted gray scales and figures and landscapes and learned light sources and perspective, as in two other early paintings. The gray scale began simply as that, a gray scale, where you alter hue and saturation between black and white. I liked that exercise and added mountains in the distance. It still looks like a gray scale, but with something else going on. The blue painting came from an exercise in creating depth through perspective, shadow, and luminosity. I made both these paintings on manufactured canvases 24 x 18”. I still have a whole pile of these canvases, which I consider beneath me now. My second Princeton painting class taught me how to make my own stretcher bars and to stretch and gesso my canvases, thoroughly enjoyable manual labor.

My Princeton painting classes took me to museums, to Philip Guston’s cadmium red, ivory black, and titanium white cigar-smoking Klansmen and John Currin’s skinny, huge breasted naked white women the color of supermarket peach flesh. I joined the throng of Guston admirers, but never acquired a taste for Currin’s virtuoso painting. I still stumble over his skinny, big-breasted women and wonder why his famously rendered Thanksgiving turkey is raw.

***

Even before art school and with what I look back on as incredible hubris, I toyed with the idea of myself as a professional artist, not a mere Sunday painter. I might want to go to art school, not just to undergraduate art school, but to graduate art school as well. I might want to work professionally. I might want to be as professional a painter as I was a historian. Well, within reason. Why would that pose a problem?

As I poke into the crevices of memory, I touch another motive for leaving history, a motive that wants to stay beneath the surface, pulling back into deeper obscurity like a darkness-dwelling troglobite I’m dragging into the light for you. It is not a nice feeling to acknowledge, but candor demands acknowledgment, for otherwise I just might have remained in the grooves of academe. For there was, as always, much more history yet for me to write. Any sentiment other than gratitude strikes me as most unbecoming in one whose achievements have been honored with a Princeton professorship, honorary doctorates from the Ivy League and beyond, and the presidencies of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association. What could be more annoying (a word I learned to employ in art school) than a person of privilege whining about what hasn’t been bestowed? Nonetheless. Nonetheless, let me whine a little. There was some sour sense of limits reached, of disappointment over book prizes not won and books not reviewed. It was as though I had assumed I’d be exempt from the rules of the world, where people who looked like me or who didn’t fit an image of how they were supposed to be were never fully seen or acknowledged. For all my lovely recognition, I seemed not properly to fit in.

I’ve never been a black person easily captured in the idea of a black person—come to think of it, no one is. No person, no black or otherwise person fits a racial mold. The idea of a black person is a stereotype that shifts its shape in order never to fit anyone real. I’ve hardly suffered or overcome hardship, can’t talk ghetto, won’t don a mask of black authenticity or speak for black people as a whole. Too many disparate themes reside in me for coherent recognition: images, phrases, people, and things from the multiple worlds I live in and have lived in over many years of life. The freedom I treasure in art reminds me of walking in Bordeaux in the 1960s and inclining toward the study of history. My mother’s dismay at the appearance of aging triggers scattered associations, from the biography of a French theorist to older women artists. Driving down I-95 from Providence calls up a memory of skidding my beetle across a snow-covered bridge over the Connecticut River when I was a graduate student at Harvard. This jumble is not smooth, but its disorderliness is what makes me me.

When I sniveled to friends that I had never received a book prize of import, they pulled me up short, and not just by recalling my honors. They reminded me of the world we live in and the off-kilter nature of my writing. What on earth did I expect? I had enough, I really did have enough in many meanings of the word. Enough in hand, I left history, in the sense of no longer writing scholarly history books as I used to, with honor and fulfillment. History remains a part of me, naturally, and it remains in me even though my relation to history became uneasy in art school.

***

After my two toe-dipping Princeton painting classes, I took the summer drawing and painting marathon at the New York Studio School on 8th Street in Manhattan. The Studio School started at 9 a.m., ended at 6, with crits stretching past 9 p.m. Okay. For me that meant get up at 6 a.m. walk across the park, take Newark light rail to Newark Penn Station. New Jersey Transit to New York Penn Station, that hell of thank-you-for-your-patience dysfunction. The 2 or 3 subway downtown, get off at 4th Street, walk to 8th Street, and arrive before everyone else.

Then the pay-off. Stand up and draw and paint for eight hours. I loved it.

I L O V E D IT.

The paper, the charcoal, the canvas, the set-ups, the model, the space, the perspective, the shadows, the colors, the smell. Concentrating hard, I did it wrong, and I did it right. I painted a still life in red and blue that taught me that you can’t mix cerulean blue from ultramarine and white oil paints as they come from a tube. A figure painting asked for warm but light browns for skin and an indefinite darker shade for light skin in shadow. This shade has no name, so you mix it out of the leavings on your palette.

Here’s the best lesson of all from the Studio School marathon: Staple a 5’ x 4’ piece of tough watercolor paper to the wall; cover it with a charcoal drawing of the model in the set-up, the very best drawing you can make. Cover the entire paper. This takes hours standing up, drawing in the heat. Sweating. Now rub out your drawing with a chamois. Owwww!! All that work for nothing! Draw it again, only 10” to the right. Okay. Concentrate. Draw. Sweat. Fill up the paper. Rub it out. Erase it again? Yes. Rub it out. Draw the model and set-up 1/3 smaller. Draw draw draw. Rub it out. Again.

Lesson learned? Essential lesson learned! You can erase what you draw, even what you’ve spent a long time drawing and sweating over. You can throw away what you paint and, as I learned to do later, cut it up and incorporate it into a new painting. A lesson to take straight to heart, and not only in art making.

I loved it. Even though I was the oldest by far, I stood up and painted right up until 6. Some of the kids came late, farted around, took two-hour lunch breaks, and left before dinner without washing their brushes. Crit came after dinner break. To accommodate Newark light rail’s evening schedule, I would leave crit around 9 PM. Start all over the next morning, five days a week. Okay, I could do it! Let’s go!

I applied to Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers with a portfolio of drawings and paintings from Princeton and the Studio School marathon. Rutgers admitted me. What a thrill! What an accomplishment! My knowing Friend Bill hinted later that undergraduate art school isn’t all that hard to get into. Be that as it may, my admission puffed me up as a worthy achievement. I affiliated with Douglass College, the (sort-of formerly) all-women’s college, for its feminist tradition, of course, also for its quiet.

***

In the summer before I started at Mason Gross, Dear Husband Glenn and I attended an art exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. You will only hear of Glenn occasionally, when absolutely necessary because Glenn doesn’t want a role in this story. We were together in Paris, where the Grand Palais had installed a huge show of stirring paintings, abstract and figurative, witty videos ironic and silly, sculpture bright and colorless, and perfectly gorgeous drawings: a feast for the eyes of color and movement and sound. Wait a minute. What in creation was spilling over several folding tables—used ball-point pens, foil, torn newspaper, doodles, bits of paper, the contents of a wastepaper basket held together with cardboard and brown packing tape. A shapeless mass of faded color and haphazard images. Too-muchness splayed out from one section to another without any composition, without coherent color that I could see, as though a drunken Do-It-Yourselfer had turned over his trash barrel in the lofty Grand Palais. Hunh? An art enigma. A mistake, surely. But what did I know? I did not know this was art.

This piece by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn had won the show’s first prize, and Hirschhorn was installation art’s shining international star. I hadn’t yet heard of installation art and didn’t know that in the twenty-first century this was more than any old art; it was good art, excellent art. The best art. With work in the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and the Walker Art Center, Hirschhorn had hit all The Art World’s high notes and strutted off with its prizes.[1] Clearly, this was art, and Hirschhorn was a major artist. Hirshhorn’s work raised the oldest questions in the world of art, questions that followed me for a very long time afterward. What counts as art? Who is an artist? Over the course of several years, I learned the answers. The hard way. In art school.

***

From Old In Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over by Nell Painter, published by Counterpoint.

***

[1] By “The Art World” I mean the important museums and galleries that bestow visibility and money on selected artists, virtually all white men. Without caps, the world mans everything in and around art, regardless of sex and race and wealth and wide recognition. 

A Beginner’s Guide to Fly Fishing With Your Father

Illustration by Steven Weinberg

Heather Radke | Longreads | June 2018 | 6,282 words (25 minutes)

In front of the cash register at the fishing shop in Grayling, Michigan, between the Trout Unlimited maps of the river and the hats that say size matters, there is a small shelf lined with business cards. Each of the stacks of cards, save one, are for fishing guides, men who will take you to the good spots on the river and teach you how to cast a fly rod. The final stack of cards is for a local urologist.

I am here with my dad, trying to finally learn to fish. We have driven three hours up the middle of the state from Lansing to Grayling, one struggling city to another. Camp Grayling, just outside of town, is the training ground for the Michigan National Guard. There is only one expressway that far north in Michigan, and as we approached Grayling on the two-lane highway that runs to the Upper Peninsula, tanks and camo Humvees slowed us down, too big to pass.

Michigan is a state of struggling towns, places that depend on a trickle of tourism, small farms, or a single industry. There was a time when the promise of the unions and the auto industry was this: You can make enough money working on the line to have a house in town, a car in the driveway, and a cottage on the lake. It feels ludicrous now to think that a blue-collar job could propel you so far into the middle class, particularly as we drove through the desiccated remains of the failure of that once-true promise. Grayling was the kind of place where you might have built the cottage. Now the tanks, the Family Dollar, and the boarded-up bow-and-arrow factory hint at the presence of another Michigan cliché — the Michigan Militia, a right-wing paramilitary group that was once rumored to be affiliated with the Oklahoma City bombing.

As we turn off the main road into the gravel parking lot, the fishing shop stands before us in contrast to much of the rest of town. Fly-fishing is a gentleman’s sport. It is literary and beautiful, historic and manly. Elegant in the simplicity of its mechanism, it suggests stewardship and stalwartness. This shop does not sell florescent orange camouflage vests or mechanized crossbows. It sells fishing baskets and slouchy hats, signs that say catch and release, volumes of poetry from local authors, millions of tiny hooks and feathers meant to be ordered neatly into small boxes, collected and organized taxonomically for ready response to myriad conditions. Read more…

Balancing the Books

Pamela Hansford Johnson, English novelist and critic, chatting to novelist Olivia Manning at a party given by the British PEN Club to celebrate the opening of the club's new headquarters in Chelsea. Original Publication: Picture Post - 4722 - People Who Write Your Books - pub. 1949 Original Publication: People Disc - HM0383 (Photo by Picture Post/Getty Images)

It’s going to take a lot of work to correct history so that it includes all the great women whose lives and work have been overlooked and obliterated by the patriarchy. But strides are being made! The New York Times is retroactively publishing obituaries of notable women and others who aren’t straight white men. And now The Paris Review, which had virtually erased one of its own women editors from its masthead, as A.N. Devers reported last December *, has launched something of a corrective: “Feminize Your Cannon,” a monthly series featuring “underrated and underread” female authors.

The first installment, by Emma Garman, profiles British Novelist Olivia Manning (1908-1980), known best for her novel School for Love and for her Balkan and Levant trilogies.

It took Manning until late in her career to achieve a level of real acclaim, perhaps because her stories drew on harsher aspects of real life and less likable women characters — aspects that might have been better appreciated if she were publishing now. Manning was so vocally dissatisfied with her career she was known as “Olivia Moaning.” A contemporary of Iris Murdoch and Kingsley Amis, she was outwardly jealous of their greater success and fame. She’d bristled at the idea that she’d be more successful posthumously, but that’s what came to pass.

Seven years after her death in 1980 at age seventy-two, the BBC aired Fortunes of War, a faithful seven-part adaptation of the Balkan Trilogy and the Levant Trilogy. Starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh and featuring multiple international locations, the series had the highest budget in BBC history. Masterpiece Theatre’s broadcast of the show in the U.S. prompted the New York Times to call Manning “the only English woman novelist to have painted a broad, compassionate and witty canvas of men and women at war that invites comparison with Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh.”

Manning would have been gratified to finally hear it—and then disappointed anew. Today those who have read Manning’s novels (usually only the trilogies, as most of the others are out of print) tend to admire them. But her place in the pantheon of important twentieth-century British novelists, even of rediscovered women authors such as Elizabeth Taylor and Rosamond Lehmann, is marginal and precarious. The scholar and critic Rohan Maitzen, when writing about Manning, found “that her name was wholly unfamiliar to two of my academic colleagues who are specialists in early 20th-century literature.” None of Manning’s work is available on Kindle.

“Not all writers of genius take the public by storm,” she writes in her introduction to a 1968 edition of Northanger Abbey. “Jane Austen in her lifetime was successful without being a sensation.” The self-consolation is touchingly evident.

In the mean time, Devers soldiers on in her efforts to make sure women authors are given their due and more widely read. She’s just successfully crowdfunded a new business, The Second Shelf, which will offer “rare books, modern first editions, manuscripts, & rediscovered works by women,” plus a quarterly publication.

*The omission has since been corrected.

Read the story