Inside our January/February 2025 Issue
Standing Firm
This is not the note I expected to write, but then: these are not the times that we wished to live in.
The books in this issue were selected in a period of tremendous hope, and arrive to you in a period of great trepidation. Among the regressions we face in the new political season are a gutted educational system and book bans—measures that readers fear and that historians find ominous. In the face of these challenges, we can only offer the assurance that we’ll be here, with you, in the fight. Lifting up important indie titles, celebrating voices from the margins: that has always been our mission, whether the tides are moving society forward or threatening its delicate progress.
Standing with you in this moment, we want to call your attention to a few prescient titles in particular. See Harbingers, about the threats posed by the January 6th attack on the Capitol, the Charlottesville march, and the perspectives that both represented; there’s advice here on not giving in. See Immemorial, which reckons with intense climate grief in poetic, searing terms. And see Darkenbloom and The Lady of the Mines, which peek at the wounds left by twentieth century fascism, their keening pages truthful and alarming.
While preparing this issue, I was also struck by these lines in A Fool’s Kabbalah, which follows postwar efforts to gather the literary remnants of extinguished communities. Its mournful hero, Gershom Scholem, weaves through Europe gathering texts, motivated in part by the belief that “God [made] the world out of words … didn’t it follow that, after the catastrophe, words were what the world should retreat back into?”
Those who attack knowledge and books do so by design: they know that both threaten tyranny, and that a well-read populace is hard to control. We know it, too. Let each of these 100+ books be your and your community’s strength, and take heart: there’s more to come.
Michelle Anne Schingler
