Personal views on (mostly) books.
Bi-weekly reflections, blasts, blips, & screeds on books, writing craft, & the reading life, with occasional guest contributors.
Other fun, surprising things.
Music? Kid cameos?Interviews?
Probably.
Some newsletters will read like personal essays, others like criticism, others like fawning gushes of books and writers that make the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Others (hopefully) will be weird and playful. All will have a personal touch.
Occasional First Thoughts reflections—a callback to my first year of newsletters—where I write about whatever makes itself available. (“First thought, best thought,” says Ginsberg.) Music, parenthood, art, the anxious brain, endurance athletics, nature, etc.
book(ish) will (probably) always be free. Paid subscribers will receive a few extra goodies, but the greatest gift you can give me is sharing this newsletter with a friend.
What’s happening here:
After a five-year, hot & heavy career as a book critic, I’d had enough. I quit cold turkey in 2018 and pivoted my freelance work to more joyful, lucrative projects, but I still love books and creating community around them, so this is a natural extension of my life.
So, I guess book(ish) is less “critic,” more chatty, emerging fiction-writer guy at the deli counter hulking a bag of books. (At least, that’s the goal.)
“I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order—pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.” - Kate Zambreno, Heroines
Why me?
I’m restless. I’m hungry for authenticity. I’m always experimenting. I’m books-obsessed. I love my friends and writing that cuts close to the bone. I’ve published fiction, personal essays, profiles, criticism, and even some poetry if you count zines and my college newspaper. I have an MFA in fiction from Pacific University, and my work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Washington Post, the Iowa Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Millions, the Rumpus, Spectrum Literary Journal, Sugar House Review, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and the Minneapolis-Star Tribune, among other places. I’m the former editor-at-large of Thirty-Two Magazine (R.I.P.), and for years I wrote regular columns and profiles for The Growler magazine (also R.I.P.). I’ve edited book-length fiction, memoir, pop science, and sci-fi. In 2019 I received a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant to finish my short story manuscript. I’ve taught classes on writing and literature at The Loft Literary Center (where I was awarded the Teacher of Excellence Fellowship in 2018) and Century College. I’m currently shopping around stories from my manuscript, and I’m working on new stories and a novel.
Here’s my very official author website
Reach out:
I’d love to hear from you! cook.joshuap@gmail.com.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
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