First things first: Join us live today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern for an exclusive conversation with acclaimed novelist Rebecca Makkai about chairing this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction jury. She promises to spill some tea about what goes on behind the scenes. We’ll also ask the "I Have Some Questions for You” author what else she’s reading now.

Our Ink Book Club selection for June is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say. (We will sit down for a live conversation with the author on Wednesday, June 17 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern.) Somehow in our snark-infested, virality-obsessed culture, a novel whose drama is contained mainly inside the head of a New England schoolteacher is one of the bestselling books in the country.

On the outside, Artie Dam is viewed variously by his family and friends as a decent, amiable man, though perhaps slightly “dopey.” To his son Rob, “he was an enigma…his father had always been Jolly Artie, and Rob felt there had to be more to him. But he could not really find it.” None of those around him are aware of how much feeling churns within--that Artie is a tortured soul obsessed with suicide. Strout writes that Artie’s wife Evie “was unaware–even after their thirty-four years of married life–of the deep pockets of sensitivity that Artie had.”

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Strout’s eleventh novel subtly, expertly captures our fractious times, and the toll its accompanying divisiveness has wrought on our emotional health. She identifies the dissonance between the way the world perceives us — and what we choose to signal — and what’s really transpiring within the whirling dervishes of our brains.

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Early on in the book, Strout suggests a reversal of the idea that “no man is an island.” What her characters represent is that while we may be interconnected in various ways, at a fundamental level, we are actually isolated beings, alone on our individual islands. In other words, our present collective loneliness should come as no surprise.

Despite its sense of quiet despair, why does The Things We Never Say leave the reader with a sense of life’s beauty, of optimism? Novelist Maggie Shipstead put her finger on it in her New York Times review of the book: “A loss of innocence is possible at any age, but the pain of disillusionment can have a silver lining: the opportunity to live with a deeper understanding of reality.”

We’d love to hear your thoughts on Artie and The Things We Never Say. We’ll sit down with the author herself later this month to discuss her process, where she finds inspiration, and why she felt compelled to attribute much of Artie’s discontent to the era of Trump.

And don’t forget to join us for a behind-the-scenes chat with Rebecca Makkai, chair of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction jury. We may even get a sense of how Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus — a WW I novel with elements of horror and magical realism narrated in one endless sentence — beat out a fan favorite, Audition, by Katie Kitamura, to win the Pulitzer. Please join us! Here’s Makkai’s Substack piece “Book Prizes Don’t Work How You Think.”

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Below, you’ll find some discussion and reflection prompts to consider. The Ink Book Club’s events are open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.

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Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. opens his harrowing new work, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, with this declaration: “I do not love America, and never have, especially now.” And yet the emotion and scholarship with which he pokes and prods his subject suggests a deep caring.

In advance of America’s 250th this July 4th, Glaude interrogates the meaning of “this supposed day of freedom,” what it might mean to “those who bore the brunt of the country’s refusal to live up to its promise.” He invokes Frederick Douglass: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?...To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license.” The words of W.E.B. DuBois, John Dos Passos, James Baldwin, Herman Melville also enrich throughout.

The book’s thesis is that “Like the celebrations before it, the Semiquincentennial reaches back to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.” He observes that there is a “doubleness,” a “paradox” that rests at our nation’s heart, and taints its founding. Glaude doesn’t mince words: The backlash to “wokeness,” DEI, and Black Lives Matter “has been swift and harsh…Mirrors shattered, people who claimed to be allies now worried about the overreach…the celebration of 250 years since founding hides the broken glass beneath our feet.” And: “The ugliness of what white people believe about color—that somehow, in some inscrutable way, the color of one’s skin determines your value.” For those who proclaimed the death of racism: “The country has given us Donald Trump, and we have to deal with the madness again. The pounding in the skull returns as we struggle to beat back the ‘intolerable bitterness of spirit,’ because these people have done this shit again.”

There is an electricity, a visceral quality to this work that discomfits, provokes, disturbs. And yet there is a musicality to the prose, which is amplified by the bars of original music written for the book by classical composer Joel Thompson.

We hope you’ll join the Ink Book Club for a Substack live conversation with Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. Monday, June 1 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern. The bestselling author of Begin Again—a James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton—will be with us to discuss his “elegy that mourns the country we thought we knew,” and how we can reclaim hope, which is “shadowed by ambivalence at the crossroads.”

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In the book’s acknowledgments, the author writes: “This has been one of the most difficult books I have ever written…thinking about Donald Trump and this perilous moment in the nation’s 250th year has brought me to the brink of madness.”

And yet Glaude concludes that “America is possible if we imagine it so, if we tell ourselves better stories and follow the signs, like those on the quilts of the enslaved, that direct us to the path of freedom.” He warns against letting Trump and his supporters achieve their aim—to “occupy our imaginations.”

In this deeply felt, deeply researched book, Glaude leaves it all on the page. Join us for what will no doubt be an enlightening, engaged conversation.

And if you’re not already a subscriber to Glaude’s Substack, “A Native Son,” check it out!

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Below, you’ll find some discussion and reflection prompts to consider. The Ink Book Club’s events are open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.

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“As I look back at my work,” novelist Elizabeth Strout observed in a recent interview, I realize that I’ve been increasingly interested in the idea that not only do we not understand other people, we probably don’t know who we are in reference to other people.” And for coach and high school teacher Artie Dam, the protagonist of Strout’s profoundly tender and perceptive latest, The Things We Never Say, that realization has produced an existential despair that leads him to contemplate various ways of killing himself without letting on to his wife and son that he’s died by his own hand. He quietly obsesses over the options, while outwardly maintaining a cheerfulness many view as bordering on dim-witted.

This is a novel about Trump-era instability and angst—a simmering panic about to boil over—and a loneliness felt more deeply when loved but not truly seen. In Artie’s case, he is beloved by his family and entire community of students, colleagues, and friends, yet he shares his suffering with no one. The author has referred to what she is getting at here as “the singularity and mystery of each person,” who “held within themselves a vast, unknowable universe.” (Anyone wondering why Belle Burden’s Strangers has been such a success can stop on that observation.) Miraculously, Strout’s fictional lens nurtures comprehension and compassion—for ourselves and others—a kind of new-born empathy that great novels often produce in a reader. I think this is Strout’s best book since Olive Kitteridge, for which she won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It’s also her most political book. While past novels have made passing references to the cruelty of the Trumpian universe, there’s a whole new level of internalized chaos that Artie, for one, inhabits, as he frantically combs history books for parallels to the rising tide of fascism he sees emerging. Sadly, his state of mind rings as familiar. That Strout also manages to inject humor into these scenarios is another measure of her subtle brilliance.

The Things We Never Say is the Ink Book Club’s June selection, and Elizabeth Strout will be our guest later this month, after she returns from the European leg of her promotional tour. We will announce that date shortly.

Meantime, on Wednesday, May 27 at 12:30 p.m. EDT, we will host a special Ink Book Club Live with Courtney Maum, author of Alan Opts Out, which hits bookstores on June 2. In its starred review, Publishers Weekly called Maum’s satiric novel “a fierce and funny portrait of late-stage capitalism and its limited supply of happiness.”

Maum will also talk to us about her Substack, “Before and After the Book Deal,” and exchange notes on what we’ll be reading this summer. Please join us, and let us know what’s on your TBR pile this season!

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And here are a few of the books I’m taking with me to the Jersey shore to celebrate the long weekend, a mix of advance galleys and finished books.

Below, you’ll find some discussion and reflection prompts to consider. The Ink Book Club’s events are open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.

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In part two of our Ink Book Club conversation with the author of “On Morrison,” Namwali Serpell, we go on a brief tour of Morrison’s oeuvre. Throughout, we are reminded just how intentional Morrison was in shifting away from the white gaze, and, as a result, breaking new literary ground. It’s also astonishing to be reminded that Morrison was writing the work that would earn her the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature in the 1960s and ’70s, while raising two boys on her own. During that time, she was also employed as an editor at Random House, and teaching college English.

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“On Morrison” opens with an examination of the author’s first novel, “The Bluest Eye.” When it came out in 1970, Morrison was already making her mark as an editor, but still looking for validation as a writer. She had doubts that her debut would earn her the title of “novelist.” But by the time she began writing “Jazz” in the early 1990s, she was no longer concerned with critical reception or reader approval, but with how far she could push the envelope of form.

Together, Serpell’s chapters comprise a master class. Each places a particular Morrison work — arranged chronologically from first to last — beneath a critical microscope, examining how the author’s ideas coalesced around plot, character, history, and style. So let’s dig in with my question-and-answer with Serpell.

“Nobody Knows The Bluest Eye” is chapter one in “On Morrison.” Here you write that Morrison’s novels teach us how to read them, and also “teach us how to write our own stories.” What does “The Bluest Eye” have to teach us?

Banned as it’s been, we know what “The Bluest Eye” is about: a little black girl who wishes she had blue eyes. That’s not a spoiler. Morrison didn’t believe in spoilers. She gave away the whole plot of “The Bluest Eye” in its opening narration: “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow.” The gossipy tone and the mystery of the missing marigolds divert our attention from those six key words: “Pecola was having her father’s baby.” Morrison immediately obviates the notion that suspense and finding out what’s going to happen are the most important parts of reading. This preface concludes: “There is really nothing more to say–except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.”

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On the contrary.

Morrison, in Serpell’s telling, would have had serious problems with the approach to history of many of her own devotees. She didn’t believe in “erasure,” but rather in addition. Add beside the bad statue a better statue. Put a noose the neck of a towering monument to a Confederate general.

This is the kind of idea that has a way of challenging everyone, both the people who still revere those generals and the people who think they have a sacred right not to encounter traces of history that upset them.

It is the kind of challenge great writers make.

We talked this week with May Ink Book Club author Namwali Serpell about her wonderful new book “On Morrison.” We will follow this next week with a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the book, each focused on how to read the Nobel Prize winner’s major works. And we’ll discuss why, in Professor Serpell’s view, Morrison relished the role of literary “trickster,” experimenting with style and point of view.

In today’s sit-down, Serpell talked about:

• Why Morrison embraced being regarded as “difficult,” and even took this is a compliment

• The frustration Morrison felt when the original publishers of her debut novel, “The Bluest Eye,” didn’t do a better job editing that novel, which almost prompted the author to reclaim publishing rights and release a revised edition

• Serpell’s “relief” that she never got to meet her subject in person, and Morrison’s desire to “remain a mystery”

• Why Morrison’s body of work provides an alternative view of our history as we approach America’s 250th anniversary

You won’t want to miss any of it. Just click on the video player above to watch the entire conversation.

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“Critics generally don’t associate black people with ideas,” observed Toni Morrison in an interview for the 1983 book Black Women Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate. That epigraph opens Namwali Serpell’s masterful On Morrison, the Ink Book Club’s May selection.

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Serpell, a Guggenheim fellow and professor of English at Harvard, here takes us on a provocative journey through the Nobel winner’s oeuvre, exploring why the late writer remains such a titanic figure—and lightning rod. Serpell writes that “Morrison has shaped the way we think about everything from literature to politics to criticism to ethics to the responsibilities of making art,” which may be why her novels are so often the target of censors. For one, her 1970 debut novel, The Bluest Eye, remains one of the most frequently “challenged” books in the U.S., according to the American Library Association, as does Beloved, for its “brutal depiction of slavery.”

About On Morrison, the New York Times critic Wesley Morris wrote: The author “has hopped on a rocket and touched the Tonisphere with her mind…What Serpell’s written, devised, built is a novel-by-novel treatise on, inspection of, spelunking into, playing with Morrisonian philosophy, aesthetics, craft; and she might be having the time of her life.”

While acknowledging Morrison’s genius, Serpell also writes that “Morrison incensed all kinds of people. How dare she be a difficult writer and a black woman? How dare she refuse to placate or translate? How dare she insist on her own brilliance.” Let’s find out what she means, and why she—like Morrison—does not capitalize “black.”

Join us Wednesday, May 6 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern for this live Ink Book Club discussion with Serpell, who will take us behind the scenes in the decades-long composition of On Morrison. We get the benefit of being one of Serpell’s students without having to pay tuition at Harvard.

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Below, you’ll find some discussion and reflection prompts to consider in advance of Wednesday’s conversation. The Ink Book Club’s events are open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.

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• How deeply Elon Musk has interfered with elections here and elsewhere, on the basis of the false notion that “whites are a rapidly dying minority”

• The Justice Department’s case against the Southern Poverty Law Center and what it portends for other organizations;

• The tactics used by propagandists to persuade voters to fight for privileges provided by dictators instead of the power provided by democracy

• How to resist hopelessness and despair in the face of these anti-democratic measures

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Your support is how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.

Join us today, or if you are already a member, give a gift or group subscription.

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How to participate in the Book Club

Each week, we’ll post questions, and on alternate Wednesdays we’ll meet for a discussion with the Club or a visit from an author or other special guest (occasionally we’ll schedule special events on alternate days or times, but we will let you know). Look out for posts with further details.

In between meetings, we invite you to chat or comment on our posts with your insights and questions. The Book Club will meet next on Wednesday, May 6 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern.

To participate in our meetings and author talks on Substack Live, join from your phone or tablet with the Substack app. You can also watch from your computer at The Ink, and comment and ask questions in our chat, but you won’t be able to join the live video discussion. Make sure you enable notifications, and when our meetings begin, you should receive an email alert; if you can’t find the message, just check the notifications tab (the small bell-shaped icon to the upper right of the website or lower right of the app at the time of the event to find a link.

Book Club meetings are open to paid subscribers to The Ink, so if you haven’t become part of our community, join us today!

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Can the book-publishing industry survive shrinking attention spans, endless streaming options, the AI onslaught, and the prophesied disappearance of the American reader?

I braved cross-country air travel last weekend in the hope that the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books would offer some answers—or at least bring me face to face with multitudes of fellow book nerds who also greet news of, say, a new Ann Patchett or Colson Whitehead novel with the passion of a Swiftie. And along the way, I got to meet Stacey Abrams and read her a special message Oprah sent me to read to her.

Come with me.

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Just click on the video player above to watch the conversation now.

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We’re making a preview of this conversation open to all. If you want to watch the whole thing, we invite you to become a supporting subscriber, which includes membership in the Book Club and access to our discussion guides, group chats, and live discussions.

Your support is how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.

Join us today, or if you are already a member, give a gift or group subscription.

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How to participate in the Book Club

Each week, we’ll post questions — our discussion guide — on Sunday, and on alternate Wednesdays we’ll meet for a discussion with the Club or a visit from an author or other special guest (occasionally we’ll schedule special events on alternate days or times, but we will let you know). Look out for posts with further details.

In between meetings, we invite you to chat or comment on our posts with your insights and questions. The Book Club will meet again with Ibram Kendi on Wednesday, April 22, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern.

To participate in our meetings and author talks on Substack Live, join from your phone or tablet with the Substack app. You can also watch from your computer at The Ink, and comment and ask questions in our chat, but you won’t be able to join the live video discussion. Make sure you enable notifications, and when our meetings begin, you should receive an email alert; if you can’t find the message, just check the notifications tab (the small bell-shaped icon to the upper right of the website or lower right of the app at the time of the event to find a link.

Book Club meetings are open to paid subscribers to The Ink, so if you haven’t become part of our community, join us today!

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Chain of Ideas: The Origins of our Authoritarian Age is the How to Be An Antiracist author Ibram X. Kendi’s groundbreaking new book — and it’s already a New York Times bestseller. As Trump and other would-be autocrats around the world move to turn back the clock on progress so many have worked long and hard to achieve, Chain of Ideas traces the spread of our current xenophobia to the promulgation of “great replacement theory,” popularized by French novelist and immigration conspiracist Renaud Camus in his 2011 book The Great Replacement.

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For those unfamiliar with the idea, great replacement theory proponents hold that “powerful elites are enabling disadvantaged groups to steal the lives, livelihoods, cultures, and electoral power and freedoms of privileged groups, who now need authoritarian protection.” Under this view, “One’s life, one’s job, one’s status, one’s way of living, one’s freedoms, one’s nation — all can be perceived as lost, slipping away, in need of authoritarian protection and restoration.” Democracy becomes collateral damage in this worldview, as white privilege is prioritized over all else.

Obviously, this rings a lot of bells. Trump’s entire playbook vis-à-vis his opposition to immigration, diversity, abortion, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights; his suppression of the history of slavery; and countless other policies can be understood as growing out of the embrace of great replacement theory.

Later today, Wednesday, April 1, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, the Ink Book Club will sit down live with Ibram Kendi to learn more about his eye-opening, perspective-shifting work. This time around, Kendi will introduce us to the book’s concepts, and then — since the book runs more than 500 pages — he’ll join us for a second live conversation later on Wednesday, April 22, once we’ve all had the chance to dig in. And while you’re reading, you can consult Kendi’s extensive notes at chainofideasbook.com.

Ibram X. Kendi is an author, activist, historian, and Howard University Professor. He won the National Book Award for 2016’s Stamped From the Beginning, which Kendi’s production company made into an Emmy-nominated documentary. Join the Ink Book Club today to learn more about why we are where we are, and how to curb the further spread of this dangerous theory, and call it out when we see it.

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Below, you’ll find some thoughts to consider in advance of Friday’s conversation. The Ink Book Club’s events are open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.

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Anderson talked to us about the breakdowns of intelligence under Jimmy Carter’s administration that shaped U.S. policy in the region, how the Ronald Reagan campaign exploited the hostage crisis to win the 1980 election, Donald Trump’s apparent lack of even the concept of a plan for the current war, and why he thinks Ayatollah Khomeini’s brutal Iranian Revolution was a transformational moment — the event that laid the groundwork for our authoritarian era.

If you’re looking for real insight into what’s actually happening in America’s latest war, click on the video player above to watch now.

And catch up on our previous conversation with Anderson at the link below:

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We’re making a preview of this conversation open to all. If you want to watch the whole thing, we invite you to become a supporting subscriber, which includes membership in the Book Club and access to our discussion guides, group chats, and live discussions.

Your support is how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.

Join us today, or if you are already a member, give a gift or group subscription.

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How to participate in the Book Club

Each week, we’ll post questions — our discussion guide — on Sunday, and on alternate Wednesdays we’ll meet for a discussion with the Club or a visit from an author or other special guest (occasionally we’ll schedule special events on alternate days or times, but we will let you know). Look out for posts with further details.

In between meetings, we invite you to chat or comment on our posts with your insights and questions. The Book Club will meet next on Wednesday, April 1, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, with Ibram X. Kendi, for the first of two conversations on his new book, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of our Authoritarian Age.

To participate in our meetings and author talks on Substack Live, join from your phone or tablet with the Substack app. You can also watch from your computer at The Ink, and comment and ask questions in our chat, but you won’t be able to join the live video discussion. Make sure you enable notifications, and when our meetings begin, you should receive an email alert; if you can’t find the message, just check the notifications tab (the small bell-shaped icon to the upper right of the website or lower right of the app at the time of the event to find a link.

Book Club meetings are open to paid subscribers to The Ink, so if you haven’t become part of our community, join us today!

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• Our mutual love of Tayari Jones’ novel Kin, and that time on the Oprah cruise…

• Two debuts Charles is particularly excited about;

• Charles’ enduring passion for Anne Tyler;

• The pleasures and challenges of reviewing without a net;

• Some of the spring/summer books we are looking forward to reading, like Ann Patchett’s Whistler and Douglas Stuart’s John of Johns.

You won’t want to miss any of it. Just click on the video player above to watch our conversation.

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We are thrilled to announce that our April Ink Book Club selection is Chain of Ideas: The Origins of our Authoritarian Age, by Ibram X. Kendi. This monumental new work from the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning looks at “great replacement theory” and what we can do to defend our democracy from further erosion by this insidious threat.

Dr. Kendi is a prominent historian and also author of the international bestseller How To Be an Antiracist. He will join us for the first of two live conversations next Wednesday, April 1, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern here on Substack.

And this Friday, March 27, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, join the Ink Book Club and King of Kings author Scott Anderson as we do another deep dive into how we got into the mess with Iran, and where things stand now.

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Your support is how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.

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And if you haven’t already, please also subscribe to Ron Charles’s newsletter.

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How to participate in the Book Club

Each week, we’ll post questions — our discussion guide — on Sunday, and on alternate Wednesdays we’ll meet for a discussion with the Club or a visit from an author or other special guest (occasionally we’ll schedule special events on alternate days or times, but we will let you know). Look out for posts with further details.

In between meetings, we invite you to chat or comment on our posts with your insights and questions. The Book Club will meet next on Friday, March 27, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, with Scott Anderson, author of our March pick, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution—A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation.

To participate in our meetings and author talks on Substack Live, join from your phone or tablet with the Substack app. You can also watch from your computer at The Ink, and comment and ask questions in our chat, but you won’t be able to join the live video discussion. Make sure you enable notifications, and when our meetings begin, you should receive an email alert; if you can’t find the message, just check the notifications tab (the small bell-shaped icon to the upper right of the website or lower right of the app at the time of the event to find a link.

Book Club meetings are open to paid subscribers to The Ink, so if you haven’t become part of our community, join us today!

Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app

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Whether you’ve been joining us as we reread 1984 or you haven’t looked into it since high school, you won’t want to miss this conversation. Just click on the video player above to watch now.

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We’re making a preview of this conversation open to all. If you want to watch the whole thing, we invite you to become a supporting subscriber, which includes membership in the Book Club and access to our discussion guides, group chats, and live discussions.

Your support is how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.

Join us today, or if you are already a member, give a gift or group subscription.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Get 20% off a group subscription

How to participate in the Book Club

Each week, we’ll post questions — our discussion guide — on Sunday, and on alternate Wednesdays we’ll meet for a discussion with the Club or a visit from an author or other special guest (occasionally we’ll schedule on alternate days or times, but we will let you know). Look out for posts with further details.

In between meetings, we invite you to chat or comment on our posts with your insights and questions. The Book Club will meet next on Wednesday, March 25, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, with former Washington Post book critic Ron Charles. And on Friday, March 27, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll have our second conversation with Scott Anderson, author of King of Kings.

To participate in our meetings and author talks on Substack Live, join from your phone or tablet with the Substack app. You can also watch from your computer at The Ink, and comment and ask questions in our chat, but you won’t be able to join the live video discussion. Make sure you enable notifications, and when our meetings begin, you should receive an email alert; if you can’t find the message, just check the notifications tab (the small bell-shaped icon to the upper right of the website or lower right of the app at the time of the event to find a link.

Book Club meetings are open to paid subscribers to The Ink, so if you haven’t become part of our community, join us today!

Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app

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In an afterword to the 75th anniversary edition of George Orwell’s 1984, novelist Sandra Newman writes that Orwell’s classic dystopian saga is actually an expression of “negative utopia,” a response to the traumas of the world wars, the prospect of nuclear destruction, and the ensuing “mood of hopelessness which pervades our age.” Would dehumanization — the mechanism by which “the Party” maintains absolute power — win the day, or could people throw off despair and the erosion of integrity and spirit, and reclaim their empathy, their ability to freely think, create, and love? Those are Orwell’s central questions in 1984 and in much of his other writings, which today feel urgent and prescient.

As I reread 1984, I was reminded of how many terms he coined that continue to pervade our culture: “thought police,” “doublethink,” “Big Brother is watching you,” “Ministry of Truth,” “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” There is also the “Two Minutes Hate,” the daily ritual during which Party members are required to gather around a screen and watch a film depicting the “Enemy of the People,” programmed to incite “compulsory rage” in its audience. Orwell apparently envisioned the rise of certain podcasts and the likes of Fox News.

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Later today, Friday, March 20, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, the Ink Book Club will sit down with American University professor Laura Beers, the author of Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century and a leading expert on the subject of what Orwell has to teach us. If you’ve felt as I have these last weeks, perhaps you, too, need that lifeline.

Beers writes that “many of the core problems that Orwell identified in his own time continue to haunt us in the twenty-first century. Most crucially, the tension between individual liberty and social solidarity… 1984 was, in a sense, an exercise in truth-telling, in that it was an effort to open the readers’ eyes to the existential threats to truth, and thereby to freedom, posed by all-powerful states.” Those threats have materialized in the Trump era.

In the course of rereading 1984, there were a few times when I had the TV news playing in the background. Our own “Ministry of Truth” had leader Trump contradicting his own statements about the status of the war in Iran, if, indeed, he could admit that the assaults underway constitute a war. Trump lackeys parrot and parse his words, and tell us what we are seeing and hearing with our own eyes and ears isn’t what is actually happening. Our institutions are being decimated, often gleefully. The mysteries of the Epstein files deepen, redactions spreading like oil spills. Heroes we thought were above reproach turn out to be monsters.

It’s all positively Orwellian.

Though it’s startling to remember that George Orwell was really Eric Arthur Blair, lifelong anti-fascist, and 1984 a warning. And, perhaps, that these are also Blairian times?

There will be much to unpack with Professor Beers tomorrow. Hope you’ll join us for some “Thoughtcrime.”

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Below, you’ll find some thoughts to consider in advance of Friday’s conversation. The Ink Book Club’s events are open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.

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Anderson talked to us about the book, how the cardinal sin of previous American administrations — believing their own propaganda — laid the table for Donald Trump to replay the Bush administration’s campaign against Iraq, launch this war on Iran, and kick off the spiraling crisis consuming the Middle East and the world economy, why this war is so unlikely to remove the current Iranian regime, the dangers facing reporters today, and much more.

If you’ve been looking to understand how we got into the current Middle East crisis, you won’t want to miss this. Just click on the video player above to watch now.

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How to participate in the Book Club

Each week, we’ll post questions — our discussion guide — on Sunday, and on alternate Wednesdays we’ll meet for a discussion with the Club or a visit from an author or other special guest (occasionally we’ll schedule on alternate days or times, but we will let you know). Look out for posts with further details.

The Book Club will meet next on Friday, March 20, also at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, with Laura Beers, author of Orwell’s Ghosts.

To participate in our meetings and author talks on Substack Live, join from your phone or tablet with the Substack app. You can also watch from your computer at The Ink, and comment and ask questions in our chat, but you won’t be able to join the live video discussion. Make sure you enable notifications, and when our meetings begin, you should receive an email alert; if you can’t find the message, just check the notifications tab (the small bell-shaped icon to the upper right of the website or lower right of the app at the time of the event to find a link.

Book Club meetings are open to paid subscribers to The Ink, so if you haven’t become part of our community, join us today!

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For those Ink Book Club members who, like me, aren’t Iranologists, our March selection will be illuminating — and deja vu-producing. Scott Anderson’s Kirkus Prize-winning King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution–A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation probes Iran’s complex geopolitical history and underscores that our country’s leaders have failed yet again to get Iran right.

Anderson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and author of several widely praised books, including Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics’ Circle Award. Presumably, Anderson didn’t know while researching his book that eight months after its publication, we would be at war with Iran.

What does he think about this turn of events? With his vast knowledge of the country, what are his thoughts about the path this war might take? And what does he make of the Trump administration’s various rationales for it? We’ll ask the author about that and much else tomorrow, Friday, March 13, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when he joins us for a live Ink Book Club conversation.

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King of Kings couldn’t be more timely, as it asks critical questions about what the U.S. is trying to achieve right now: Have we learned nothing from our past mistakes in Iran and elsewhere in the region? Are there remaining experts in the State Department and elsewhere who would have urged a different course of action if consulted? Does King of Kings provide a useful backstory for why we are where we are, or is this uniquely Trumpian?

Meantime, there is something Shakespearean about the saga of the “King of Kings”---Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi — who the U.S. helped re-install in the Iranian throne in 1953, after a CIA coup dubbed Operation Ajax overthrew the country’s prime minister, who’d nationalized Iran’s oil industry. It’s still all about oil….

Anderson opens his account in 1977, as protests against the Shah are being secretly nurtured by an ascendant cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini. By this time, the Shah had essentially lost the people’s confidence, but, surrounded by sycophants and feted by the Carter administration, he’s oblivious to the winds of change, even with access to the intel and muscle of his feared secret police, SAVAK. And while there were a few American voices who detected the seeds of the Iranian Revolution taking root, those voices were silenced — even censured — by the Carter Administration, so firmly did it believe in the Shah’s invincibility and their own worldview.

Soon thereafter, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 blindsided the Carter administration and the Shah himself, forcing the leader into exile and sparking seismic reverberations throughout the world — effects Anderson likens to the far-reaching impacts of the French and Soviet revolutions.

Willful blindness and a failure to comprehend the mood of the Iranian people were our enemies then. How does Anderson analogize that series of errors in the context of today’s stream of blunders? What are the lessons we could be deriving from a deeper knowledge of that period? And why have our current leaders been caught unawares by the resilience of the Iranian regime? In its adoption of the so-called Mosaic Doctrine, had the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) anticipated the current U.S. attacks and specifically prepared to defend against them? These are some of the questions we’ll pose to Anderson tomorrow.

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Below, you’ll find some thoughts to consider in advance of Friday’s conversation. The Ink Book Club’s events are open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.

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Why are we at war with Iran? Trump, Hegseth, and Rubio have offered an array of rationales, none of which add up, for a war without a clear mission — and one that neither the American public nor our allies are supportive of. Terrifyingly, our own leaders seem completely ignorant of how the Iranian regime they are attempting to topple emerged decades ago, and how the “obliviousness” of previous U.S. administrations led directly to the 1979 Iranian revolution and the rise of the Islamic Republic in the first place. Worse, they seem set on repeating the mistakes of the past.

Scott Anderson’s Kirkus Prize-winning King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution — a Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation is our March Ink Book Club selection. It is a stunning, revelatory work of narrative history that argues that the U.S.’s inability to predict and comprehend that seismic power shift has thwarted American ambitions and influence and damaged countless lives across the Middle East ever since.

In reading King of Kings, it becomes clear that accurate warnings of what was transpiring on the ground in Iran were roundly ignored. Sane, intelligent voices like Michael Metrinko, a Farsi-speaking U.S. diplomat, were suppressed by superiors, who viewed him as a kind of dissident in their ranks. About a month prior to the revolution, Metrinko was barred from a meeting where he intended to share what he feared would soon transpire: that the U.S.-installed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi would fall; that Iranian anger towards America was bottomless; that Ayatollah Khomeini’s movement was ascendant. Metrinko would become one of the 52 American hostages held for 444 days at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

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In a New York Times review of King of Kings published when the book first came out last August, author Mark Bowden called the book “masterly,” saying it “illustrates the stubborn American blindness that hastened the shah’s demise and helped the mullahs prevail.” In our current moment, it provides essential context for what has already transpired and what may still be to come.

When we sit down this week with Scott Anderson for the first of two Ink Book Club live conversations on Friday, March 13, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll have lots of questions, among them: How did we get here? Where do we go from here?

What questions will you have for him? Let us know in the comments below.

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Additionally, this month, we will be in conversation with Laura Beers, the author of Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century, as we reread 1984, by George Orwell. Beers’ utterly fascinating account won the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, and was described by The New Yorker as “lucid” and “powerful.”

Our live conversation with Laura Beers will take place here on The Ink on Friday, March 20th, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern. So get out your dog-eared copy of 1984, or pick up the 75th-anniversary edition, released last year. (Did you know that Orwell initially wanted to title the novel The Last Man in Europe? His publisher suggested “1984” would be better received by the public. That’s an understatement!)

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Below, you’ll find some thoughts to consider in advance of Friday’s conversation. The Ink Book Club’s events are open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.

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• Rev. Lawson’s beginnings and the advice from his mother that led him to nonviolence

• On being willing to die for your country and your cause — but not kill for it

• What Rev. Lawson learned from the independence movement in India

• His first meeting with Martin Luther King Jr., and how he became a leading theoretician of the civil rights movement’s use of nonviolent direct action

• His relationship with other civil rights leaders, and his extension of the fight for equality to achieve economic justice

• How he continued King’s work, working with the labor movement, for immigrants’ rights, and for women’s rights

• His thoughts on Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, and the lessons of the civil rights movement for our times

• Rev. Lawson’s vision of the ultimate expression of nonviolence: the beloved community

By the way, today, March 7, is the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when civil rights marchers (including Rev. Lawson) led by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chair and future Congressman John Lewis were beaten, whipped, and tear-gassed by police as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The public outcry over the violence at Selma and against other peaceful marches that month led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In our times, it’s a reminder that the future remains unwritten, and that people can come together to change minds and make change.

For insight into the life and work of one of the key minds of the civil rights movement, you’ll want to hear the entire conversation. Just click on the video player above to watch.

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We’re making a preview of this conversation open to all. If you want to watch the whole thing, we invite you to become a supporting subscriber, which includes membership in the Book Club and access to our discussion guides, group chats, and live discussions.

Your support is how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.

Join us today, or if you are already a member, give a gift or group subscription.

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

Get 20% off a group subscription

How to participate in the Book Club

Each week, we’ll post questions — our discussion guide — on Sunday, and on alternate Wednesdays we’ll meet for a discussion with the Club or a visit from an author or other special guest (occasionally we’ll schedule on alternate days or times, but we will let you know). Look out for posts with further details. We invite you to chat or comment on our posts with your insights and questions in advance of our meetings.

To participate in our meetings and author talks on Substack Live, join from your phone or tablet with the Substack app. You can also watch from your computer at The Ink, and comment and ask questions in our chat, but you won’t be able to join the live video discussion. Make sure you enable notifications, and when our meetings begin, you should receive an email alert; if you can’t find the message, just check the notifications tab (the small bell-shaped icon to the upper right of the website or lower right of the app at the time of the event to find a link.

Book Club meetings are open to paid subscribers to The Ink, so if you haven’t become part of our community, join us today!

Get more from Anand Giridharadas in the Substack app

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Nonviolent: A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation, and Love is the posthumous memoir of Reverend James Lawson Jr., a peer of Martin Luther King, Jr., theoretician and strategist of the civil rights movement, and mentor to the late Congressman John Lewis and the Freedom Riders.

There are so many timely questions to discuss around life and work of this largely unsung hero of the civil rights era, including how he came to believe so strongly in the power of nonviolent protest; what he might make of the gleeful bluster around war we’re seeing from the likes of Pete Hegseth; and what we might learn from his experience about how to more effectively use — and turbocharge — the tools of resistance.

Join us this Friday, March 6, at 12:30 pm Eastern for a special edition of the Ink Book Club live, when we’ll sit down with journalist Emily Yellin, co-author of Nonviolent: A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation, and Love. Reverend Lawson’s son, John Lawson, will also join the conversation.

The Ink Book Club’s events are open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.

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Below, you’ll find some thoughts to consider in advance of Friday’s conversation — and some news about The Ink Book Club’s next pick!

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In our Ink Book Club conversation with George Saunders around Vigil this past Wednesday, we touched on some profound themes: death, the afterlife, capitalism, greed, sin, free will, and the value of kindness and comfort. That talk drew an audience of more than 2,000 on a weekday afternoon, which makes me think that more than anything else, what we crave most now — besides a sane and civil government — is community. We are so privileged to be able to come together around books.

Reading Vigil has prompted me to go back to Saunders’ past work, beginning with his debut, a collection of stories titled CivilWarLand in Bad Decline that was published in 1996. In the volume’s six stories and a novella, people struggle in a dystopian future, ”a degraded cosmos” where “Flawed” people stage historical reenactments for the wealthy. The politics of scarcity is the theme, with a Mad Max-ian twist.

We’d love to hear which of Saunders’ thirteen published works you’ve read, and if you now plan to dig into books you may have missed.

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On another note, last week we lost the great book editor and publisher Ann Godoff, who died of complications from bone cancer at 76. Her legacy is enormous, as is her loss. Over the decades, here are some of the authors she edited and published: Ron Chernow; Zadie Smith; E.L.Doctorow; Michael Pollan; Thomas Pynchon; Ocean Vuong; Caleb Carr; John Berendt; and The Ink Book Club’s own Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis. She came to book publishing in her early thirties after studying film at NYU under Martin Scorsese. She rose to become the head of Random House, and after being unceremoniously fired from that post, founded the Penguin Press.

In her New York Times obituary, one of her authors, Bill Shore, recounted his first meeting with her, during which she “described the book she’d like to see written, the book she said she’d want to read,” going on a “literary jazz riff.” She concluded by saying, “So, if that’s what you want to write, if you want to write a book about the cathedral within, then that’s a book I want to buy.” Shore then wrote The Cathedral Within: Transforming Your Life by Giving Something Back, which was published in 1999.

She was formidable, brilliant, private, and influenced countless editors who aspired to publishing careers as remarkable as hers. Her longtime Penguin Press colleague, Scott Moyers, characterized her influence on book culture as “incalculable.” He went on to say that “she made us all braver and better,” and that she lived by these words of poet Mary Oliver: “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

We will forever miss Ann Godoff.

On Wednesday of this week, we will announce our March Ink Book Club pick, so stay tuned. And on Friday, March 6, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll host a live conversation with Emily Yellin, co-author of the late civil rights activist Reverend James Lawson Jr.’s Nonviolent: A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation, and Love, along with Lawson’s son, John Lawson. Please join us for an important and timely special edition of The Ink Book Club, and below you’ll find some questions to consider in advance of our conversation.

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The Ink Book Club is open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.

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