Summer Special and Open House!

Through Labor Day Weekend!

Hi everyone!

We thought we’d take these last quiet weeks of summer, when we hope you are either swinging in your hammock with a book or at least trying to channel the feeling, to celebrate another year of Book Post, opening up some of our subscriber-only reviews and inviting those on our free list (you!) to become paying subscribers. We’re gilding the invitation with a shiny discount: subscribe now and receive a year of Book Post at 30 percent off.

Here are some of the treats that have come our subscribers’ way in the last year:

Padgett Powell remembers his old teacher Donald Barthelme

Joy Williams discovers a writer she loves from a tiny ad in Harper’s

A new documentary history of Plymouth Colony tells new stories

We lost Cormac McCarthy; a Book Post appreciation of his last work

Isabella Tree, who “rewilded” her English estate, considers New World prehistory and the American landscape

Àlvaro Enrigue journeys across the border with us to find real-life violence and dusty archives coalescing as literature in the work of Cristina Rivera Garza

Ange Mlinko remembers “the hairs on my neck rising” when she first read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” “on the sad sunken couch in my parents’ damp basement living room”: An Eliot Centenary

Lawrence Jackson hunts down the “human … complete with feelings” lurking in the cheeky carnival of Percival Everett

Michael Idov, who wrote for the post-Wall TV thriller Deutschland 89 and grew up on the other side, relishes John Le Carré

Our subscribers have also received Nicholson Baker’s readings + drawings, prompted by books that have caught his attention, like this one on Alain Corbin’s History of the Wind. Nick describes his foray into drawing, of which we have been appreciative beneficiaries, in his forthcoming book Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art.

And—not from our paid posts but banner moments from the last year—we’ve had Michael Robbins’s Diaries on what sticks in his ear (The Grateful Dead and Rainer Maria Rilke, natch) and our fantastic, ongoing Middlemarch Summer Reading with Mona Simpson, which has become like a running summer book picnic. Please join if you are not already there! (Existing followers can opt in to email updates in their account settings.)

If you subscribe now you’ll receive these delightful coming attractions in the weeks ahead: Arthur Schwartz on Jewish Roman cuisine; Sumana Roy on the sixteenth-century Hindi lyric; Emmanuel Iduma on the great kingdoms of Africa; Benjamin Friedman on the birth of cash; Edward Mendelson on Bible translation, free and faithful; and more of course.

If you’re appreciating Book Post, your paid subscription will help us keep this ship afloat. You can also take advantage of Substack’s referral program to extend your subscription by telling a friend. We can use your help too being visible on all the new social platforms: follow us and engage @bookpostusa (waving a special flag for Book Post’s intrepid Julia and Oscar on our own Middlemarch TikTok).

We aspire to be fun and pleasurable, but more seriously to find new vehicles for sustaining reading culture in a time when lingering reflection feels more and more like an endangered activity. Be a part of the movement:

I am so grateful to you all for helping us to make Book Post a reality, and wish you a restorative and not-too-hot few weeks, preferably with a book.

Your devoted editor,
Ann

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Image created with the help of Dall-e