Happy Winter Solstice
Dear Friends,
Happy winter solstice—I love this short day, long night, and celebrate it every years. Lately, with the holidays, stress-producing book release, and medical crisis all at once, I’ve been eager to get through a bunch of stuff and on to the next thing in 2025. But I also feel over-the-moon fortunate to have gotten good coverage of How We Know Our Time Travelers five years after I first started writing the stories in it. Here are some lovely things:
*The San Francisco Chronicle ran a feature about the book by journalist Hannah Bae.
*The Minnesota Star Tribune ran a beautiful and thoughtful review by critic Christine Brunkhorst.
*The Los Angeles Times ran a sharply intelligent, gorgeous (occasionally cutting) review by critic Charles Arrowsmith.
The book also got mentions in Ms. Magazine, Nob Hill Gazette, Book Maven (Bethanne Patrick’s substack), Alta, Gizmodo, Reactor, Book Riot, and Vol. I Brooklyn. And then there are those pieces that authors write to accompany the release of their book. I wrote a few of these:
How to Portray Time and Memory
13 Books by Indian Diaspora Authors You Should Read (entirely serious in my proposal of a dinner party)
If you are so inclined and don’t hate the book and don't mind the ask, I’d appreciate Goodreads or Amazon ratings so that Amazon will start recommending the book (I know, I know, ugh Amazon, but I do feel WTAW took a chance on this book and it would be nice if it appeared on readers' radars). I missed reviewing a few books that really interested me this past year. Perhaps I’ll have a chance to write about them in the coming year. However, I’ve been trying to make my own work the priority in my off-hours; book review space is shrinking—or at least the paid book review space—and I feel like I have so much to make up for, having neglected my own literary needs over the last several years. The books I wish I could have written about, in case you haven’t heard about them, are Jennine Capó Crucet’s Say Hello to My Little Friend, Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History, Jeff Vandermeer’s fourth Southern Reach novel Absolution, and Jon Chu’s memoir, Viewfinder. I may start to write member-only posts/newsletters that feature author interviews and literary journalism more frequently—and in those I could write about books that aren’t perfectly current or in sync with the publicity cycle.
On Thursday, I went into the KQED headquarters to talk best books 2024 with host Alexis Madrigal, arts reporter/producer Ugur Dursu, and Brad Johnson of East Bay Booksellers on Forum. That space is so spacious and airy. A Filipina artist’s bold and beautiful work was on the hallway wall as I walked in. I’m not usually about offices, but the aesthetics of that one were pleasing. The conversation flowed—it was a lot of fun, and I heard about a couple of books I want to read. If you want other people’s recs (you already have mine from last time), here’s the recording.
Here’s what I’m asking myself this morning, the first day of vacation—what to throw myself into next?
Typically, I don’t have two novel ideas knocking against each other, at once. Novels are so big and all—consuming that the only deviations I make while writing them are short stories and essays. But I’m wondering now whether to write a whole new novel, one that departs genre-wise from what I’ve been obsessing over for years (surveillance, politics, dystopia, highway 1) and perhaps will be a softer book, a künstlerroman, for purposes of staying even-keel during our impending second Trump era OR whether to keep going with a sequel to the dystopic book that hasn’t sold. From the perspective of story, I want to chase the latter—my mind is still figuring out what happens next and it’s been fun to tell myself this story. With the former book project, however, I’ve been going through all my boxes of old stuff from the nineties, an act that brings me an escape with a lot of pleasure and nostalgia.
I think I’ll follow the heat, but curious what other people are thinking about as we approach New Year’s and make our plans for the coming year. What would you choose?
I’ve been working on an essay about Anaïs Nin, Anna Kavan, Nin’s The Novel of the Future, Kavan’s Sleep Has His House and emailed with with Nin’s foundation to see whether I could visit Nin’s house down south in Silver Lake, a house she shared with Rupert Pole. The Anaïs Nin Foundation kindly shared photos, but the house has been sold, so there goes that aspect of the research. Still, I love this little passion project. Lately I’ve been struggling to convince myself that it’s worth working on spec, if something is interesting enough. Everything involved with letting your kids have opportunities, much less the cost of grabbing a bite with a friend, is so expensive!! And then, of course, there are medical bills, of which I have a ton.
Happy holidays whether you celebrate solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hannukah, or the season itself.
Anita