Here’s everything that got us through this week.

By Brittany Allen

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April 25, 2025, 1:54pm

This week we at Lit Hub sought deep focus, wise Dad energy, and salt. We celebrated surprises and anniversaries. We looked spring in the face and said, do your worst.

Speaking of the season. Drew Broussard is “reallllly digging” a 2023 Kali Malone album, Does Spring Hide Its Joy. He insists this record—an ambient, durational groove featuring three long drones for cello, guitar, and sine-wave oscillator—is “probably the best writing background of all time.” Happily for fans on a roll, Malone has a deep bench. Two weeks ago, the experimental composer reissued her 2019 breakthrough, The Sacrificial Code, to much acclaim. And if drones aren’t your bag, here’s another listening recommendation.

James Folta has what he describes as a turbulent relationship with sunflower seeds. But this week he and the salty snack reentered a honeymoon phase. (“The grocery store near me stocks the good Turkish seeds, and I can’t get enough of the little guys.”)  Though tough to crack, deez nuts also make good fidget spinners. Pair them with the drones and get cracking, all ye on deadlines.

I got joy this week from an original movie—Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker. This madcap, IP-flaying odyssey is high pastiche. Drew takes aim at the superhero franchise, and the clubby comedy world. But it’s also a coming-into-self story about her transition, employing totally novel animation and practical effects. Every frame surprised me, and that made for such a nice viewing experience. We can still be surprised at the movies. Isn’t that nice?

Jessie Gaynor drew inspo from a three-part series on Tay Zonday, AKA Adam Bahner, of “Chocolate Rain” fame, on the podcast Sixteenth Minute (of Fame). Bahner describes his life “before and after virality” and “delivers an absolutely fascinating lecture on the political context of his song that touches on Ellison, Derrida, Chomsky, the algorithm, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street (among many others). And of course, his speaking voice remains wonderful.”

Jonny Diamond wouldn’t have made it through a very stressful week if it weren’t for another periodically viral presence—Jon Hamm.  Your Friends & Neighbors, Hamm’s newest show on AppleTV, is not a comedy per se, but apparently scratches an itch for a mid-century matinee idol in the Cary Grant idiom. According to our EIC, “Hamm comes very close to nailing that rare handsome/funny/pathetic 1940s film star persona.” And we’re here for it. Elsewhere in good TV Land, we’re getting reports that Dan Sheehan has finally caught the Hacks bug. To everyone else on the fence, come on in, the water’s smart!

In IRL news, Molly Odintz attended the 11th anniversary party of La Reunion, the Austin housing cooperative she helped found (and name!). And Julia Hass went to Schmuck, a Manhattan cocktail bar, where she also enjoyed a salty surprise. A cocktail with cheese in it. Who’da thunk.

We wish you a weekend of creative inspiration, oohs and aahs, and savory bites/sips. Hang in there.

For this Indie Bookstore Day, here are odes to ten of our favorite bookstores.

By Literary Hub

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April 25, 2025, 10:00am

Tomorrow, Saturday 4/26, is Independent Bookstore Day! And while every day can and should be Independent Bookstore Day (stop buying books from Amazon, stop linking to books on Amazon, stop posting the Amazon sales and the B&N sales on your social media), it’s nice that we have a dedicated holiday to celebrate all the great things that your local indie does for your community. This year, over 1600 stores will be participating across all 50 states, with events and author signings and giveaways and parties and so much more—a truly impressive show of indie strength. It’s almost like reports of the bookstore industry dying are… made up? Exaggerated? A convenient fiction propagated by Amazon to justify their predatory monopoly? But that’s an issue for another day.

Today, we’re here to celebrate the bookstores we love—so here are some (some!) of the Lit Hub staff’s odes to beloved indies. Let us know your favorites, too (and make sure you tell them you love them while you’re at it).

The Word is Change

The Word is Change
Brooklyn, NY

The Word is Change is my neighborhood indie bookstore, and also happens to be my favorite. It’s my absolute go-to for everything I need, bookwise. They have new popular fiction, they have radical political texts, they have an enormous collection of used books (many of which once belonged to me, thank you Alexander for buying!) It’s a dream and a privilege to have such a great local bookstore just down the street, and is instrumental to making my neighborhood feel like a community. –Julia Hass, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Buxton Books

Buxton Books
Charleston, SC

The best reading I ever did was in Charleston, South Carolina, a city where I don’t know anyone. Generally speaking, if you’re a first-time writer whose book hasn’t been anointed by any major book clubs, readings in unfamiliar cities are, at best, sparsely attended. Not so at the incredible Buxton Books, which, in addition to being a completely lovely store with an excellent range of books, knows how to throw a reading. People walking by came in off the street and then asked thoughtful questions during the Q&A. There was laughter. There was wine! The people who work at Buxton are generous, hilarious, and of course, book loving, and they made me a rabid fan of the store for life. –Jessie Gaynor, Senior Editor

Village Well Books & Coffee
Culver City, CA

I love Village Well because it’s my little sister’s local. We live across the country from each other and don’t get to see each other that often, but from the minute this place opened, I felt like I had a line to her through Village Well. Obviously we talk on the phone and stuff but if you know what I mean, you know what I mean: it’s different to have a sense of being connected through not only books but through a bookstore. I’ve since visited a few times (including a few weeks ago to see their still-newly-expanded space) and it makes me feel like she and the community in Culver are being well taken care of indeed. –Drew Broussard, Podcasts Editor

Bruised Apple Books

Bruised Apple Books
Peekskill, NY

The first used bookstore I remember going to, and the first I fell in love with, was Bruised Apple Books in Peekskill, NY. I don’t think I was a natural “Used Book Guy.” The idea of book that was worn and beat-up cut against my youthful fussiness — I tucked in all of my shirts until well into elementary school, for example — but the idiosyncratic sections at Bruised Apple fascinated me. The store and its quirky shelving and notes rewarded wandering and browsing in a new way for me, beyond the consumerism of the mall bookstore or the directed research of the library. There were vast intellectual worlds out there, and each time I became interested in something, Bruised Apple offered a shelf of well-thumbed books to explore. I got a book on Stonehenge, a too-intellectual study on the historiography of dragons, and my first short story collection, if memory serves.

When you see a whole shelf of books on a topic you’ve never heard of, or four copies of the same book by an author who is brand new to you, it humbles you in wonderful ways. The Bruised Apple didn’t so much expand my world as much as it shrunk my own sense of what I knew.

Beyond the books, Bruised Apple was one of the places where I grew up too. I went there with my parents and saw what books they were picking up. I went there with crushes and experienced self-conscious and flirtatious shared browsing for the first time. I went there with one friend who bought a Smash Mouth CD and then wept the whole ride home because it was the wrong album, while his mom tried to soothe him and I sat in silence. And Bruised Apple was one of my earliest encounters with the thrilling feeling that there was so much to read, and so much I hadn’t read. Whenever I’ve been back, I’m impressed by their selection. I know nothing about the process of sourcing, culling, and curating used books, but the Bruised Apple continues to do a great job: there’s always something new to see. — James Folta, Staff Writer

Charlie’s Queer Books

Charlie’s Queer Books
Seattle, WA

Charlie’s is a perfect little gay dream of a bookstore. All the books are queer and all the walls are pink! What more could you ask for! I love going to Charlie’s to check out their great book selection, read in their cute upstairs reading nook, and gossip with the book sellers. Charlie’s also hosts a lot of very cute community events like book clubs of every genre, writing groups, craft circles, and drag story time for kids. It’s just cute! I’m really grateful to have a bookstore this gay and wonderful in my city. Everybody say thank you Charlie!! –McKayla Coyle, Publishing Coordinator

Three Lives and Company

Three Lives & Co.
New York, NY

I’ve got an embarrassment of indie bookstores to shout out in New York (and Kingston–looking at you, Rough Draft). But one place that makes me very happy is Three Lives & Co in the West Village. A very dear friend and store regular introduced me to this place, and it’s sort of the perfect bookstore. It’s cozy, but lovingly curated by a fleet of absolute reader rockstars. (The seasonal staff recommendation newsletter is unparalleled.) Doesn’t hurt that it looks from the outside like one of Charles Dickens’ sweeter conjurings. There’s these big windows, and a fetching red awning. It feels quintessentially New York, to the extent that if you’re classy about it, there’s some very fun people-watching to be done in that (one, single) aisle.

My friend and I have a standing date where we go to Three Lives and pile up on off-the-beaten paperbacks and then dash across the street to Julius to catch the end of happy hour. We call it our ‘Toni and Fran time,’ and never do I feel more literary. –Brittany Allen, Staff Writer

Autumn Leaves

Autumn Leaves
Ithaca, NY

Autumn Leaves in Ithaca, NY has been and remains my favorite indie bookstore some fifteen years running. Its recent acquisition by the proprietors of PM Press—which you can hear more about in this episode of the Lit Hub podcast—has injected its shelves of used books with some new titles from the leftist press mixed in among the majority-secondhand offerings. Everything you’d want a bookstore to be: a place to host community events, a spot where you can plop down in a raggedy armchair and read undisturbed for a few hours, a shop that somehow always has an inexpensive copy of that novel someone recommended to you just last week, Autumn Leaves is it. –Calvin Kasulke, Associate Publisher

The Seminary Co-op

The Seminary Co-op
Chicago, IL

I have been to the Sem Co-op only twice: once when it was a deliriously convoluted underground bookstore in the basement of the Chicago Theological Seminary, and once in its current incarnation, a light-filled (read: above ground) space a block away, where the store moved in 2012. I love bookstores, but as someone who reads and writes about books for a living, I am rarely surprised by what I find in them (this is especially true for new bookstores). But through some specific magic, in both iterations of the Co-op, on visits a decade or more apart, by some organizational (or disorganizational) magic, I found books I never knew I always wanted. No small feat! –Emily Temple, Managing Editor

Rough Draft Bar & Books

Rough Draft Bar & Books
Kingston, NY

Well I mean I’m biased, I guess: I’m also the bookstore manager for this spot. But the thing is, it would probably be my favorite store in the world even if I wasn’t—or to put it another way, I’m the bookstore manager here because I love this store so much. Jonny Diamond once called this store one of the best bookstores in the world and who am I to disagree? (I would like to think that our curation will now satisfy Bookforum subscribers, but that’s between me and Jonny to hash out.)

But in all seriousness, the thing I love about Rough Draft is that it is more than just a bookstore. Yes, there’s a charm to wandering into a space densely packed with books, books, and more books (and okay maybe some sidelines like cards and keychains and notebooks and what-not) — but the future for bookstores is, I think, in true third-space territory. By way of example: Rough Draft features a truly world-class coffee program spearheaded by Josh Rosenmeier, a top-flight beer menu curated by Dan Fiege, bread and pastries from sister shop Kingston Bread + Bar, big old windows that let in the light of the world without letting (much) of the elements inside, and a cheery cast of staff and regulars alike who make the place feel… well, like a place you want to be. I know the names of those people not just because I work with them, but because Anthony and Amanda Stromoski (owners of RD and KBB) have made it a point that everyone should know everyone, because that’s what community is all about. Rough Draft is a gathering spot, a satellite office, a movie theater, a pub, a café—and, oh yeah, a bookstore. Come see me some time, I’ll hook you up. –Drew Broussard, Podcasts Editor

The Buzzed Word

The Buzzed Word
Ocean City, MD

No summer is complete without a trip to the beach, and no trip to the beach is complete without a visit to The Buzzed Word!! My friends and I always plan at least one (and usually more than one) visit to this amazing bookstore/natural wine bar on the Atlantic coast. The drinks (both alcoholic and NA) and snacks are delicious and the book selection is so choice. I always leave with a few really cool books I’d never heard of and a few more books that I’ve been looking for forever but never see at bookstores. Going to The Buzzed Word is one of my favorite summer rituals. Beach reads forever! –McKayla Coyle, Publishing Coordinator

Time to re-read The Masses, the 1910s literary magazine crushed by government censorship.

By James Folta

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April 24, 2025, 3:48pm

This political moment in America has been chilling for free speech and dissent, but like so many things about America, this government and vigilante repression isn’t new. Before Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mohsen Mahdawi speaking out against war and genocide, there were Art Young, Max Eastman, and The Masses speaking out against war and conscription.

The Masses was a literary magazine that ran from 1911-1917, and published a wide variety of writing: fiction, poetry, reporting, art and essays by Walter Lippmann, Sherwood Anderson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Reed, and more. Founded by a Dutch socialist immigrant, the magazine was also richly illustrated, which is probably how it’s best remembered today. The Masses championed both modernist and realist illustrations, and ran political cartoons by Art Young and Fighting Bob Minor, among others. Take a scroll through their covers — their style grew and evolved into something very contemporary over the years.

I haven’t read the full run, but by all accounts The Masses was staunchly left-leaning and socialist, but it wasn’t seen as dogmatic either. The magazine’s most prominent editor, Max Eastman, wanted to make a magazine that championed radical ideas as well as art for its own sake. He envisioned “A Free Magazine”:

This magazine is owned and published cooperatively by its editors. It has no dividends to pay, and nobody is trying to make money out of it. A revolutionary and not a reform magazine; a magazine with a sense of humour and no respect for the respectable; frank; arrogant; impertinent; searching for true causes; a magazine directed against rigidity and dogma wherever it is found; printing what is too naked or true for a money-making press; a magazine whose final policy is to do as it pleases and conciliate nobody, not even its readers — There is a field for this publication in America. Help us to find it.

Eastman had joined the magazine with a group of contributors from NYC’s Greenwich Village, a creative and activist group of bohemians who created the Greenwich Village reputation that still remains today. In August 1912, this group elected/forced Eastman to be The Masses’ editor. He learned of his new job from a short note: “You are elected editor of The Masses. No pay.”

Politically, The Masses covered and championed the causes of working people and was aligned with many of the reformist and revolutionary causes of the Progressive Era. They were broadly pro-labor, pro-women’s suffrage, pro-birth control, and pro-social. They were staunchly on the side of the worker and the striker, which led them to their first run-in with the law.

In 1912, The Masses accused the Associated Press of covering the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek mine workers strike in a way that favored the employers and their hired private detectives. The A.P. brought suit, and Eastman and the cartoonist Art Young were arrested by New York City’s DA on charges of libel against the A.P. and its president. But after two years and a lot of litigation, the case was quietly dropped.

But the magazine’s real problems came after America entered the First World War. President Woodrow Wilson, who championed America’s march into WWI, was worried by the number of Senators and members of Congress who had voted against the Declaration of War. Seeking tools to curb dissent, the President pushed the passage of the Espionage Act, which gave the government vast power to squash speech they didn’t like.

Fears that anti-war sentiment and the spirit and politics of the 1917 Russian Revolution would spread in the U.S. led to swift implementation of the Act. As historian Adam Hochschild said in The Nation’s “Start Making Sense” podcast: “They did lock people up under the Espionage Act and under copycat legislation, which many states passed, and even some localities… Between 1917 and 1921, roughly a thousand Americans spent a year or more in jail.”

The law made illegal any interference with the military’s operations and its recruitment efforts. This is the legislation that led to socialist politician Eugene Debs’ arrest and sentencing to a ten-year prison term after he gave an anti-war speech in Ohio. Debs was still in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary two years after the war ended, when he ran for president and won nearly a million votes.

The Wilson Administration also used the Espionage Act to deputize American vigilantes to target dissent. The Justice Department created the American Protective League, an officially sanctioned vigilante group that beat up attendees of anti-war rallies, targeted draft dodgers, and organized raids to arrest anyone caught without their draft exception papers. By the end of 1917, a quarter of a million Americans were wearing the official League badges.

Most crucially for publications, the Espionage Act also allowed the Postmaster General, Albert Burleson, to “declare a publication unmailed.” Around 75 publications were targeted this way and could no longer be mailed, including The Masses. The Post Office went after their August 1917 issue, and cited a number of illustrations and articles as “treasonous,” including a cartoon of a cracked Liberty Bell and another of corpses lashed to a cannon titled “Conscription.” The magazine tried to challenge their ban, but the government escalated, not only specifying the work they felt was anti-military, but also adding additional charges against contributors.

Unable to ship copies to subscribers, the magazine folded three issues later, though some of the staff quickly started a new magazine, The Liberator, taking the name of Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist paper.

A month after The Liberator was founded, The Masses and its staff went on trial in New York for “obstruct[ing] the recruiting and enlistment” of the military. None of the accused took their charges or the trial very seriously, seeking to undermine the case’s credibility with disruptive humor:

Contributing to a carnival atmosphere that first day of the trial was a band just outside the courtroom window patriotic tunes in a campaign to sell Liberty Bonds and disturbing the solemnity within the courtroom itself. Each time the band played the “Star Spangled Banner” [The Masses’ business manager] Merrill Rogers jumped to the floor to salute the flag. Only after the fourth time that the band played the tune and only after the Judge asked him did Rogers finally dispense with the salute.

Despite the ruckus, Second District Court Judge Learned Hand seemed to sympathize with the defendants and dismissed some of the charges. The case ended in a mistrial and in violence: one juror was a socialist, and would not agree to the majority opinion, thwarting a unanimous decision. But the rest of the jurors were livid at the one outlying juror, and asked the court to charge him, before they attempted to force him outside and lynch him. Thankfully they were stopped.

A few months later, The Masses was dragged back in front of a judge, but this case also ended in a mistrial. But by then, the magazine had been dead for nearly a year, so the exoneration was bittersweet.

The Espionage Act, on the other hand, marched on. Postmaster General Burleson kept banning publications for another three years, until the very end of Wilson’s term, even after the President told him explicitly to stop after the war ended.

The vigilante American Protective League survived too. The Justice Department formally disbanded the League after the armistice, but many of the groups simply renamed themselves and kept intimidating and beating up left wing dissenters.

Presidents Harding and Coolidge released everyone who was convicted during the war under the Espionage Act, and some of  its amendments were repealed. But the Act has remained on the books, and was the law behind the charges of Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, to name a few.

It’s as trite as it is true, but there are always rhymes in American history. 2025 isn’t the first time our neighbors have delighted in violence against a minority, it’s not the first time censors have told us what we can and cannot read, and it’s not the first time the government has enabled our worst and ugliest impulses. It’s up to us, with solidarity and courage, to make sure it will be the last time.

The Masses full archive is available online.

Five incredible books edited by Toni Morrison.

By Brittany Allen

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April 24, 2025, 10:17am

Header image via Bernard Gotfryd photograph collection (Library of Congress)

This month, Farrar, Straus and Giroux is reissuing a spiky, forgotten jewel of a book. You may not know the author by name yet, but you’ll recognize her acquiring editor: Toni Morrison.

Maybe you already know that while writing her first few books, Morrison held down a day job at Random House. She eventually left publishing—she was burnt out by the marketplace, and needed to go paint her own masterpieces. But during her editorial tenure she discovered and championed a number of wild, wonderful voices. Many of whom really should be on your radar today.

In honor of the resurrection of Nettie Jones, here are a few more treasures straight from the master’s list.

Nettie Jones, Fish Tales

Nettie Jones’ Fish Tales was first published in 1984. Narrated by a “wily, unhinged woman named Lewis Jones, who ricochets between night clubs and sex parties in a haze of champagne, vodka and Valium,” this utterly singular, vignette-driven novel has been called erotic, assaultive, edgy, and “legitimately shocking.” Morrison apparently had a tough time selling it to higher-ups at Random House. She quit her job later that year to focus on her own writing projects.

Though the novel fell into obscurity after its splashy debut, it’s since had champions. Darryl Pinckney once considered it in the NYRB alongside another metropolitan party chronicle—Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. And this month’s snappy-looking FSG reissue has garnered praise from writers like Angela Flournoy, Justin Torres, and Raven Leilani.

Wesley Brown, Tragic Magic

This was another Morrison find. First published in 1978, this dazzling book follows Melvin Ellington—aka, The Mouth—over the course of his first day out of prison after serving a draft-dodging bid. James Baldwin praised the prose, calling Brown “one hell of a writer.”

Recently republished as part of McSweeney’s Of the Diaspora series, this short firework of a book is also ripe for reconsideration. In the Southeast Review, Aram Mrjoian praised its style, enduring relevance, and Brown’s “line-level risks, intellectual depth, and wide-ranging cultural and political subject matter.”

Leon Forrest, There is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden

Vivid, enraged, acerbic, and poetic, Forrest’s voice really deserves a louder spot in the canon. There is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden, the first novel in his Forest County series, follows “an orphaned, would-be prophet and chronicler” trying to make sense of American History. This jazzy 1973 debut is set in a fictionalized version of Chicago’s South Side, and spelunks through several dark nights of the soul.

Morrison discovered Forrest, and edited all three books in his initial trilogy. He was sometimes compared to William Faulkner for his arias in text, and other fans included Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison. Forrest’s best known epic, Divine Days, was reissued two years ago. But I think the trilogy should be next.

June Jordan, Things that I do in the dark

Did you know that Toni also edited poetry? (What couldn’t she do!) Despite inexperience with the medium, Morrison was an early champion of the poet June Jordan. She published one of her earliest collections, Things I Do in the Dark, in 1977.

In a 1975 letter, Morrison told Jordan that Random House would publish her work, but only under duress. “The answer they gave was ‘we would prefer her prose—will do poetry if we must,'” she wrote. “Now I would tell them to shove it if that were me…” She and Jordan would go on to work as peers in the The Sisterhood, a star-studded salon that aimed “to use literature for Black women’s liberation.”

Gayl Jones, Corregidora

This masterful, thorny novel follows Ursa, a Kentucky jazz singer, on a quest for “defiant survival.” It’s hard to describe this peerless book, but I’ll say that it’s both exciting to read and unflinching about ancestral trauma.

Imani Perry called Jones “one of the most versatile and transformative writers of the 20th century.” In a New York Times survey of her work, she praised Corregidora for showing that the “terror of now is as important a subject for the Black imagination as a speculatively beautiful tomorrow.”

All this is just the tip of an editorial iceberg. It should be a shock to no one that Morrison had good taste. (She also edited Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Barbara Chase-Riboud.)

And when asked about her roving place in publishing, Morrison clapped back. “People used to say how come you do so many things? It never appeared to me that I was doing very much of anything; really everything I did was always about one thing, which is books. I was either editing them or writing them or reading them or teaching them, so it was very coherent.”

Thank goodness for that.

Tommy Orange has won the Aspen Words Literary Prize for Wandering Stars.

By Literary Hub

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April 24, 2025, 10:11am

On April 23, Aspen Words announced the winner of the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize, which awards $35,000 each year to “a work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture.”

This year’s winner, chosen by a jury consisting of Dr. John Deasy, Louise Erdrich, Ben Fountain, Vanessa Hua and Tayari Jones, is Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars.

“Every tribal nation has its own story that deserves fierce emotional and intellectual telling,” said the jury in a statement. “Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange, Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, takes us from the Sand Creek Massacre to Oakland, California. On the way there, his characters become the bearers of America’s history of violence, the vessels of trauma and spirituality, and the wandering stars of addiction and redemption. Wandering Stars serves to deepen and inform Orange’s fine debut novel There, There, but it also stands on its own as a mesmerizing epic drama.”

Wandering Stars was selected from a shortlist that included Percival Everett’s James, Afabwaje Kurian’s Before the Mango Ripens, Ruben Reyes Jr.’s There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, and Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep.

You can watch the full ceremony here.