Read This Next: June Subscription Pick
The next Milkweed Books Subscription pick is here! It’s the first book of nonfiction we’re sending to our subscribers—when I ran into a board member earlier this week and told her about it, she said, “Oh good! You’re going to teach us something.” I laughed and said that I hoped it would also be fun.
Edward McPherson’s The History of the Future: American Essays (Coffee House Press, 2017) is both enjoyable and educational. It also strongly positions itself within the framework of this golden age of the essay we’re currently experiencing. For a long time, history and biography were the main players in the genre, and then memoir became a darling, if an ever-unreliable one. Now, though, the essay—in all its many forms and faces—is here in a major way.
The History of the Future is a look at various American places: New York and Los Angeles, yes, but also St. Louis and North Dakota boomtowns. This book made me reckon with and be angered by and be in love with this country again. We are a messy place caught in a messy time—but there is so much good and beauty here as well.
As this subscription club moves along it will become the sum of its many parts—and that is one thing that excites me most about this whole endeavor—even if I don’t really know what that means yet. So, as ever, I thank you for going along for this ride with me and for your support of the bookstore and Milkweed.
—Hans
P.S. Not a subscriber yet? It’s never too late! We’ll send you a new book every other month, plus we promise *insider extras* in every package. Sometimes that means autographed copies, sometimes it means special notes from the authors or perks from publishers. Intrigued? Sign up.
P.P.S. We’ve all been loving these essays, and it got us thinking about other books that explore American myths and misdeeds, boomtowns and Doom Towns. When you’re ready for the next read, we recommend these. Ed. note: It is entirely coincidental that all of these covers feature contemplative skies, but we dig it.
The World is on Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse
Joni Tevis
Milkweed Editions, 2015
Nonfiction/Essays
Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
Rebecca Solnit
University of California Press, 2008
Nonfiction/Essays
Battleborn: Stories
Claire Vaye Watkins
Riverhead Books, 2013
Fiction/Stories
Find these books and more at Milkweed Books!
From a haunted widow’s wildly expanding mansion to atomic test sites in the Nevada desert, the settings of these essays are often places of destruction and loss. And yet this collection transforms these eerie, apocalyptic destinations into sites of creation as well, uncovering powerful points of connection.