Holdings 1:2

What’s going on at The Book Hold? Here’s what’s going on.

Some books I liked

I tried to get a few thoughts down about what I appreciated in two books I read recently:

• Juan Emar’s Yesterday, and
• Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet.

Emar is Core Shit, as far as I’m concerned. Yesterday is desert island material for me. Carrington took me out of my zone. Phenomenal reads, both of them.

The Book Hold on Bookshop

The Book Hold now has a shop on Bookshop up and running. You can go there directly, or you can follow the link to Bookshop from The Book Hold’s menu bar.

The stacks

Also on The Book Hold, you can now find The Stacks, which describes various series of works I’m interested in. You’ll find links to corresponding ‘shelves’ on Bookshop as well as to individual posts on The Book Hold. The various series are intended to organize and provide context for current and future posts, and, more fundamentally, to introduce you to cool literature.

Here are the new series begun in the last few weeks, with links both to their introductory posts and to their corresponding Bookshop shelves:

• Contre-voyages is a collection of works by French authors in roughly the interwar period (mostly 1920s and 1930s), from Roussel to Artaud, who do weird things with travel writing. I’m reading these in chronological order.
  • To go straight to the Bookshop shelf, click here.
• Salidas is a collection of novels out of Spain, from the 1940s to the present, that articulate and challenge a certain literary conception of “realism.” I’m just sort of meandering around this collection.
  • To go straight to the Bookshop shelf, click here.
• Bloc experiments is an arc of works from before, during, and after the Soviet experiment in Eastern Europe. On the site I have a “syllabus” I’ll be working through, which proceeds through four ‘stages’.
  • To go straight to the Bookshop shelf, click here.

Past issues of Holdings

• 1:1