two requests

they are for good things

Hello friends—

I have not forgotten about you. I owe you an essay about revision. I will write it. And you will have it within a month. I promise—and I always keep my promises.

I would like you to do something for me. A couple somethings, actually. Is that okay?

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First thing, please consider making a donation to one or several of the Sameer Project’s ongoing campaigns for aid in South Gaza. I have made it a habit that when I feel particularly crushed with despair or feel the urge to scream at the horrors being perpetrated against Palestinians in Gaza, I seek out one of these campaigns and make a donation. If you are someone who wants to do something, but you don’t know what to do, then I recommend this.

They have a campaign for medical aid and a campaign for tents and food.

Also, if you have suggestions for actions and campaigns needing attention, please comment below. I’ll try to pin comments or edit this post to spread the word.

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Second thing, I will be at The Strand with Michael Jerome Plunkett to discuss his novel Zone Rouge on August 28^th. Please consider coming or ordering Michael’s novel. It’s a debut novel set in contemporary Verdun that chiefly concerns a group of démineurs, minesweepers. These démineurs spend their days collecting artillery and ordnance used on Verdun during World War I. This toxic payload has rendered the land brutally scarred and hostile to life, as you can imagine. They’ve been picking it up for a century, and they’ll still be picking it up in another century. The novel is about what war does to a place and to a people. What how mass violence goes into the very land and renders it inhospitable. But also, it is about the grinding tedium of having to pick out all of the little shards of metal that we use to fight our wars because someone has to do it. Human mess made by human hands has to be picked up by human hands. And the fact that it will take generations just to get close to getting some of it all, to say nothing of all of it.

I acquired and edited this novel—it might be my last as an editor—and it taught me many things about war, the cost of war, the cost of history. IT taught me about reparation and the difficulty (perhaps, the impossibility) or reparation. And how vast state violence gets down into the very groundwater of the lives of ordinary citizens, rendering those lives unsafe. It is a profound novel. But it is also funny. Poetic. Surprising. Michael is such a special writer, and I am so proud to have been his editor, and I hope you’ll come and talk to us about his book, which feels like such an intervention into our moment. It’s the sort of book I wish I had been able to write as my first novel.

So, please come out, or preorder—they really make a difference for debut novelists.

Okay, that’s all I have to ask. I will see you in a week with that post on revision. Thanks so much.

b