The main thing: Bradford cometh! I suspect this will be my last pre-Festival email, so wanted to encourage everyone to make time for the best literature festival in Britain. The programme is up, and largely settled: there are a ton of guests and programme items, ranging from fantasy to faith to film to food. And other, non-f topics too.

Some highlights:

As well as the adaptation chat, above, I’ll be taking part in discussions around the manosphere, America at 250, and the very nature of reality. As one does. At Bradford, at least. As always, if you’re there - please say hi. If you’re not there, consider going!

In the last newsletter, I wrote about Further Corruption by Snyder and Sreyam. A weird little book, published in the 1960s by a (very) alternative press rooted near the University of Chicago.

The point I was trying to make - mostly - was inside baseball about how I go about planning and structuring anthologies (and why you should pre-order them). But I forgot a) some University of Chicago alums receive this newsletter and b) all of you are glorious book nerds.

Basically, if I ever want attention (which is all the time), I just need to share a mystery book.

Some of your stories:

My dissertation advisor was a grad student at Chicago in the Sixties. Apparently the book was briefly a contentious topic on campus. The authors received some reviews in journals and such, and this was not the sort of publication with which the University wanted to be associated. My advisor doesn’t recall ever meeting the authors, but he can confirm that there was an open call to contribute to the second volume. He remembers the flyers!

That is amazing. I can see how the home of the Chicago School of Economics might not enjoy the ‘brand association’ with this bonkers tract. I do love that the authors somehow got ‘proper’ reviews for this publication. No wonder the University was so annoyed.

And another:

I haven’t ever seen Further Corruption, but I have seen others chapbooks from the People’s Press. I got one from O’Gara and Wilson when we were there because I liked the art. It was cheap because it was missing the back cover. You may remember it. It was blue-tacked to my wall. It was called ‘TENEBRAE’ and showed a small figure in the center of a corridor or hallway. It was woodcut and reminded me of Kakfa. We had a tequila argument if the figure was walking towards you (you; wrong) or away (me; correct). I never actually read the inside and it didn’t survive my many moves. I thought it was funny that you’ve encountered this press before without remembering.

Now I remember! It was unsettling as all hell, and I don’t know how you slept under it at night. (I’m still right, btw. And the figure was a woman?! Although how I could tell with a blocky woodcut?)

When I (we) were students in the early 2000s [pauses for a moment to wither into dust], the neighbourhood had a few great bookshops. The Co-Op and Powell’s are still there, and are fantastic. Powell’s’s’s selection of cheap second-hand books kept me well-supplied for four years.

O’Gara and Wilson scarpered off to Indiana in 2013(?!), but was the FANCY bookshop. It had the rare books and the leatherbound books and the manuscripts and the ephemera. Powell’s was for the students, O&W was for the professors. That said, they were very tolerant of browsers and window-shoppers, and, as the story above shows - occasionally one of would find something we could afford.

Unrelated, but… O’Gara and Wilson also had a beautiful copy of The King in Yellow that I would visit on occasion. It was the 1895 edition - not the true first (‘Salamander’), but the now-famous edition with Chambers’ own design for the King on the cover (AS SEEN ON WIKIPEDIA).

As a Chambers’ fanboy, this was my Eleanor.

Years after graduating, I was visiting Anne (who was back at Chicago, finishing one of her half-dozen degrees). The bookstore still had it! Reader, I bought the hell out of that book. It cost me $75, which was, at the time, the single most expensive book I’d ever bought in my life. It remains one of my favourite possessions. Thanks, O’Gara and Wilson!

Another:

I have a book of poetry (Pullman Cars) from UCPP. Different stamped colophon. Attached. Not dated, don’t know which came first.

And my favourite:

Bernie Sanders was a student at the University of Chicago, 1960-1964. If you spell ‘Sanders’ backwards it almost fits. Starting the conspiracy here: A. Sreyam was actually B. Sanders.

Please do share more stories of Further Corruption, its authors, The University of Chicago People’s Press or, uh, Bernie Sanders? This is great.

Not to hand-wave too broadly, but as fun as ebooks are, there’s something wonderful about books as objects, and the stories they accumulate as well.

Speaking of which, Shelfies is approaching 100 issues. That’s almost two years of well-loved books. Co-editor Lavie made a cameo appearance for issue #93 - as you would expect from a cutting edge literary and speculative writer, he shares his impressive collection of… children’s books about vegetables.

We have some amazing shelves (and shelf-owners) coming over the new few months. I don’t think there’s harm in sharing that I’ve nicked #100 for myself.

The Kansas City (Missouri) Chiefs are crossing the border to Kansas City (Kansas) in a few years, in a move that is low on mileage but big on symbolism. I’ve got a lot of emotional baggage to unpack about this one. Yes, they’re still in the same metro area, and they’re still the same team. The deal was just… bad?

The Hunt family, who own the Chiefs, are one of America’s wealthiest dynasties. But the new stadium is entirely publicly financed, and the terms of their ‘lease’ are ludicrously one-sided. The Hunts will make a lot of money off of this, and all of that money comes directly from the people of Kansas.

There’s a good piece here on the broader trends in stadium financing. Basically, almost all NFL stadiums are publicly funded, and even those that aren’t still find some way to get some cash from the public purse. I’m not a knee-jerk opponent of public financing. Although the economic benefits are dubious (except for the owners), I think professional sports teams have intangible benefits for communities and cities. They should be supported as long as they are, in turn, supportive.

In this case, the Chiefs prompted a bidding war between states and cities, and conned Kansas into a shitty, shitty deal. The Hunts could’ve financed this entire project out of their own pockets. You can’t even use the ‘well, proportionately, it is like a middle class family getting a loan for a kitchen extension’ comparison, because the Hunts could build this and have billions left over.

It is frustrating, and a general microcosm of the economic and systemic omnishambles of the day. Craig Calcaterra writes about this more cogently than I can. Ultimately healthy fandom is about giving yourself permission to care about a sports team, but while still holding the rational knowledge that the team will never care about you.

I am wending my way through an early copy of China Miéville’s new book, The Rouse. I’m not going to say much about the text itself, as I’m only a small fraction of the way in, and still unpeeling the first layers of the onion. It is a big book (1000+ pages). I am ok with big books. I recently finished a similarly outsized tome (Tad Williams’ To Green Angel Tower). But this is a very different experience. Miéville writes densely. His wordplay and vocabulary is (in)famous, and his work insists upon close attention.

Being a Miévillian fanboy, I had contemplated a proper binge-reading marathon, but was quickly thwarted. I think that’d do a disservice to both the book and my own brain. As it is, The Rouse shows how hard it is to find dedicated reading time to something that is, well… demanding. It is not a commute read or a bedtime read. It is a read that demands a commitment to reading. I’m somewhat savouring that experience, as it only highlights how rare that is for me nowadays.

Speaking of commute reads… my steady trudge through my Kindle unreads continues. A fairly unmemorable streak of historical romances, Alexis Daria’s adorable You Had Me at Hola, and Ilona Andrews’ Kinsmen series.

I attended a brilliant session at the British Library, as part of their food season. ‘Firepower: The Women of BBQ’ featured my favourite food writer, Helen Graves, alongside chefs Shauna Guinn, Genevieve Taylor, and Melissa Thompson. They were all fantastic. I left with a (very heavy) bag of books, and pages of notes on BBQ, community, and recipes. For me, at least, one of the most salient points of the discussion was set in Melissa Thompson describing the gendering of domestic labour: when BBQ became ‘fun’ rather than simply feeding the family, it became a male-dominated hobby.

I’m conscious that there are other troubling demographic and socio-economic trends in BBQ as well. I love that BBQ is popular. I love competitions and festivals and the fact that people in London now have a favourite BBQ place (they’re invariably wrong, but hey, that’s cool). But like many other forms of gentrification, there’s something awkward about witnessing BBQ move from its roots (cheap, communal food using affordable offcuts) to a fancy hobby that requires expensive kit and pricy meat. It is important that we enjoy it, and I don’t want anyone to ever not enjoy it. Bu how do we also respect its roots and history, and ensure that newcomers appeciate what made (and still makes) BBQ so special?

My theory (and that of the panel, who know better) is that part of the challenge is that we’re still in the early stages of British BBQ, and we’re largely trying to lift-and-shift American-style dishes rather than embrace the localism of BBQ as a format. (See also: my piece in Waitrose.) Graves, et al, strongly preached the virtues of cooking seasonally and locally. Although the panel agreed British BBQ is in an exciting, if rocky, formative period, this seems to be the direction of travel.

(My sub-theory is that the new plethora of urban halal BBQ joints are actually the ‘realest’ version of British BBQ, but that’s for another day.)

Anyway, I went home and cooked some ribs after. It was great.

Pre-order The Elements of Dark Academia. Please.