For Your TBR Stack

        My favorite job, in a lifetime of many jobs, was managing for WaldenBooks in the late '90s.  I loved Waldens. It was, to me, way better than whatever Barnes & Noble is now.  I don't like going into bookstores and having the same damn books suggested to me via their placement at the front of the store with promotional signage, all paid for by publishers.  In my opinion, the best books that come out each week end up spine-out in their sections (if they are even shelved correctly, that is.)

        In this space each week I will feature some books I'm not sure will be suggested to you by B&N or any other bookstore.  Usually they will be forthcoming books, often they will be hardcover, and sometimes they will be neither.  

       All book descriptions provided by the publishers, who didn’t pay me shit for this placement.

GREYHOUND: A Memoir

by Joanna Pocock

Trade Paperback

Soft Skull Press

In 2006, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock traveled by Greyhound Bus across the United States from Detroit to Los Angeles.  

Seventeen years later, she undertakes the same journey, revisiting the cities, edgelands, highways, and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers—Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin, and Irma Kurtz--- who also chronicled their road trips across the United States. Combining memoir, reportage, environmental writing, and literary criticism, Greyhound is a moving and immersive book that captures an America in the throes of late capitalism with all its beauty, horror, and complexity. Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin, and Irma Kurtz.

In the Jingle Jangle Jungle

by Joel Gion

Rare Bird Books

Hardcover

Brian Jamestown Massacre are one of the great contemporary cult American rock 'n' roll bands. At the peak of their anarchic reign in the San Francisco underground of the mid '90s, their psychedelic output, '60s sensibility, incendiary live shows and rivalry with friends, rivals and nemeses The Dandy Warhols, were almost as infamous, prodigious and impressive as their narcotic intake. A righteous account of the hazards and pleasures of life on and off the road, In the Jingle Jangle Jungle lifts the curtain on life in the band.

Funny as hell and shot through with innocence, wonder and sparkling humour, In the Jingle Jangle Jungle is destined to take its place alongside cult classics in the pantheon of rock 'n' roll literature.

If You Don't Like This, I Will Die

by Lee Tilghman

Simon & Schuster

Hardcover

Lee Tilghman —also known as @LeeFromAmerica—was one of the very first wellness influencers. To her nearly 400,000 followers, she shared daily updates and advice on everything from skincare and sleep hacks to smoothie bowls, travel tips, and workout routines. She embodied #SelfCare. Her sponsorships with such brands as Madewell and Subaru netted an income of over $300,000 a year. On the grid, her life seemed perfect.

But behind her carefully curated posts, Tilghman was in crisis, suffocating from the unrelenting demand of keeping up her online facade. Her friendships frayed from an inability to enjoy any activity, even a simple dinner, without taking hundreds of photos. She found herself viewing everything she did as potential content for Instagram. The more she shared, the more her followers craved. Her romantic relationships suffered from the pressure to “hard launch.” Her job’s focus on food led her to develop a severe fixation on healthy eating. At her lowest point, she looked around her apartment to realize every item she owned had been given to her by brands in exchange for posting. After a stay in a mental health facility to address her disordered eating and psychological decline, Tilghman quit influencing as her primary career and set out to discover who she really was.

If You Don’t Like This, I Will Die is a sharp, self-aware look at life inside the influencer economy and a relatable story for anyone who has struggled with the unreasonableness of online expectations. With over half of Gen Z aspiring to be influencers, nearly three out of five teen girls experiencing “persistent sadness and hopelessness,” and the U.S. Surgeon General calling for a social media warning label, Tilghman’s memoir couldn’t be more timely and necessary.

IRRESISTIBLE CALLING

by Sean Mitchell

TCU Press

Paperback

Sean Mitchell was teaching English at a private school in Ohio when the New Journalism piqued his interest and lured him toward a profession that was much harder to crack than he imagined. After an editor in Washington, D.C. finally gave him a chance, he found a calling that would require and reveal multiple skills: editing an “underground” newspaper in his hometown of Dallas, writing magazine length stories about long distance truckers and Z.Z. Top, serving as the Dallas Times Herald’s first rock critic and then its theatre critic, winning national recognition for his reviews. 

Moving to Los Angeles to cover Hollywood for the strangely singular and doomed Herald Examiner and then the Los Angeles Times, he profiled stars like Clint Eastwood, Ann-Margret, and his irascible former St. Mark's School of Texas soccer teammate Tommy Lee Jones. While examining the nation's preoccupation with celebrity, he wondered if journalists like him were part of the problem or part of the solution?

Ready For My Close Up

by David M. Lubin

Grand Central Publishing

Hardcover

Great films are born of great collaborations, and Sunset Boulevard represents one of the most extraordinary confluences of cinematic talent in film history—but its production was surprisingly fraught, filled with unexpected twists. Why was William Holden, who had never caught fire as a leading man, hired to play Joe Gillis after the fastest‑rising star in the business dropped out at the last minute? After Mae West and Mary Pickford turned down the now iconic role of Norma Desmond, how did Billy Wilder convince Gloria Swanson, who had long been absent from Hollywood at this point, to leave her low‑paying job as a TV talk show host to join the cast? From the writers’ room during Billy Wilder and Charles Beckett's final collaboration to the moment when the film won three Academy Awards, scholar and former Rolling Stone staffer David M. Lubin takes readers on a fascinating journey through film history that proves, once and for all, why Sunset Boulevard is one of the most iconic films in cinematic history.

Just in time for the film’s 75th anniversary, Ready for My Closeup breathes life into a beloved masterpiece of American cinema.

Beat the Bots

by Jane K. Cleland

Regalo Press

Hardcover

Even though artificial intelligence is based on a technology called “machine learning,”computers can’t learn to be creative—but you can. This book will show you the way. AI is, by definition, derivative, not creative. It can’t bring rational judgment to determine the quality or value of its work. When you bring those capabilities to your writing, your stories will touch readers’ hearts and minds.

Just as real food is better for us than processed food, and actual social interactions are more meaningful than social media, when it comes to writing your story, artificial intelligence can’t replicate your individual human intelligence, imagination, and sensibility. Technical wizardry can’t tell your story. Only you can do that. Your uniqueness is what separates you from a chatbot, and explains why you can’t be replaced by an algorithm. You’ll succeed because you’re human, not in spite of it.

Through engaging FAQs, invaluable “Pro Tips,” and “AI Weighs In” revelations, you’ll be able to apply the writing lessons and creativity tactics to all aspects of storytelling, bringing your distinctive vision and voice to your projects in ways AI simply can’t. Thought-provoking, science-based guided exercises challenge you to apply each chapter’s lessons to your own writing. Whether you’re writing a novel, literary nonfiction, or a memoir, you’ll be able to write stories that are fresh and compelling—your stories—and those are the books that publishers want and readers crave. That’s how you’ll beat the bots.