Somehow we’ve reached late July; the end of summer is approaching. Perhaps that means you’re tuning out the increasingly turbulent news cycle and passing a lazy afternoon in a hammock, or baking seaside and silently praying for even more sun—or perhaps you’re energized and ready to engage! Whatever yearning you feel, we’ve got a book to suggest, and lots of interviews, reviews, opinion pieces, and events rolling in.
Jake Maynard’s debut novel Slime Line was released in June. The Pennsylvania native had a book launch party at the Bottlerocket Social Hall in Pittsburgh on June 5, with readings by grace gilbert and Glenn Taylor, and performances by Dave Shepherd, Zach Bryson, and Flip McGuire.
Isaac Yuen, author of Utter, Earth: Advice on Living in a More-than-Human World has been busy with readings at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, Western Sky Books in Port Coquitlam, BC, Massy Art Society hosted by Massy Books in Vancouver, and Mother Foucault’s Bookshop in Portland.
Matthew Ferrence, author of Appalachia North: A Memoir and the forthcoming I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me: Essays on Rural Political Decay (August 2024) has an op ed piece with Newsweek right now addressing J. D. Vance’s questionable Appalachian bona fides. Ferrence will be featured at the Shepherdstown Book Festival in September. The weekend of August 16 Matt will be doing a books conversation with crime writer John Copenhaver, Lambda Award-winning author of *Hall of Mirrors,* sponsored by WordPlay in Wardensville.
Neema Avashia continues to establish herself as an important thinker and cultural critic, with a July 16 piece in the Guardian and interviews with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, BBC World Service, and CNN on the selection of J. D. Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate in the 2024 presidential race.
Vance’s selection has resulted in renewed interest in Neema’s book Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place and our 2019 classic, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll.
Another Appalachia was recommended as a must-read for visitors to the Mountain State by National Geographic. Library Journal also included it on their Pride Month reading list.
Since its release May 1, Sejal Shah’s How to Make Your Mother Cry has received considerable praise including a starred review in Foreword Reviews, in which Elaine Chiew calls the book “a groundbreaking literary collection that transcends limits to heighten meaning and emotional power.” HTMYMC was also recommended in the San Francisco Chronicle’s “18 New Books that Celebrate the Asian American Experience” by Hannah Bae and in Ursula magazine by Rachel Adler.
Adler frames the book as “a kind of interactive mirror for readers’ own experiences of womanhood and gendered expectations. . . . a multisensory, embodied rumination on friendships and romantic relationships, myths of aging and change and gratitude for the past as well as the present.” How To Make Your Mother Cry has also had positive reviews in Write or Die magazine, The Rumpus, Hunger Mountain, and Heavy Feather Review. If you’re in the Boston area, don’t miss Sejal’s August 7 event at Narrative bookstore in Somerville, which will include Neema Avashia, Geeta Kothari, and Rahul Mehta; and at Brookline Booksmith the next day, which will include readings by Daniel Brock Johnson and Usman Hameed
Davon Loeb’s The In-Betweens received a vibrant review by Rachel Lutwick-Deaner in Southern Review of Books, calling the book “an intimate and honest portrayal of a boy in the world” and asserting “this book is well worth reading and returning to for its distinct style and its familiar moments of childhood.” The In-Betweens also received praise in Hippocampus and was one of Electric Lit’s Best Nonfiction reads of 2023.
Loeb discussed form and memoir in a recent interview with Bomb magazine. He shares, “The In-Betweens was an experiment with form, a negotiation between poetry and prose, an agreement that both genres would be companions throughout this book,” which is a beautiful way to describe this engaging read.
Belated congratulations are in order for William Hal Gorby. Wheeling’s Polonia: Reconstructing Polish Community in a West Virginia Steel Town won the 2022 Oskar Halecki Prize, an award given by the Polish American Historical Association in recognition of work that highlights the smaller Polonia community. More recently, Gorby was invited to sign copies of his work at the New Deal Fest in Arthurdale, West Virginia.
Renée Nicholson will be highlighting Fierce and Delicate in her presentation on memoir at West Virginia’s Lewisburg Literary Festival on August 2.
Susan Hrach collaborated with Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, to create a resource for faculty based on Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning. Carleton produced a short film about Hrach and her work. Hrach also interviewed and highlighted Minding Bodies on the podcast Centering Centers and in a piece for Higher Ed AV magazine.
Jenae Cohn recently gave a webinar with the Special Libraries Association on “digital reading issues,” which featured Skim, Dive, Surface.
It’s also been a busy season for Michelle Miller and her book Remembering and Forgetting In the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. She has spoken about the book at Johns Hopkins University, Louisiana State University, University of Maryland, and at University of Maine at Presque Isle. Miller also signed copies at the Authors Row event at the National Higher Education Teaching Conference.
Remaking Appalachia: Ecosocialism, Ecofeminism, and Law by Nicholas Stump was highlighted in a recent NPQ article about queer environmental justice.
On the basis of Famine in the Remaking: Food System Change and Mass Starvation in Hawaii, Madagascar, and Cambodia, Stian Rice was invited to write a piece for the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs about the ongoing food crisis in Madagascar, resulting in a Vox video.
Engaging the Atom: The History of Nuclear Energy and Society in Europe from the 1950s to the Present edited by Arne Kaijser, Markku Lehtonen, Jan-Henrik Meyer, and Mar Rubio-Varas was recently reviewed in the journal Technology and Culture.
Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India was recently reviewed in Studies in the Novel. Stacey Balkan’s approach was described as being “comparative across time and demonstrat[ing] the affordances of the picaresque to communicate postcolonial environmental and social violence in the contemporary global scene.”
Happy summer reading!