It’s already too chilly for t-shirts but I can’t remember where I stashed the kid’s sweaters, or if any still fit: welcome to September, the too-late-and-too-soon month.
Welcome, readers—new and seasoned, expectant and jaded, strangers and friends—to a sporadic (but optimistic) newsletter that fiercely resists actual news but will occasionally share ~important updates~ like, it’s time to make the New York Times’s Plum Torte, posthaste. Forthwith. To wit:
It’s truly a very good, extremely easy cake, and here is a gift link to the recipe. It’s made for those times when you have gone slightly overboard on plums at the market and they are starting to get squishy in the bowl and attract the last-gasping fruit flies. This is the remainder of a half-kilo of bloomy blue-black quetsches (a pronunciation that eludes me) and a handful of mirabelles, which my little franglais-spouting son adores, pronounces with great, smoky-R’d rrrrrelish, and stuffs in his cheek like candy.
In other news, my new book comes out in the UK in a little over two weeks!
This is FIREBRANDS, a collection of 25 essays about women writers you may or may not have heard of, from an ancient Mesopotamian priestess to a bevy of hot mess modernists, but who are all, I think, good fun to read and read about. Or, from the official blurb, via wonderful publishers Duckworth Books:
From Murasaki Shikibu, the Japanese author of one of the world’s earliest novels, to Christine de Pizan, a poet in the royal court of medieval France, and Harriet Jacobs, who drew the world’s attention to the horrors of slavery through her own experience. Brilliantly researched and fiercely uncompromising, Firebrands is a reminder to all of us to question what – and who – is considered part of the canon.
Some BTS honesty: this was a HARD book to write, to keep faith with, to finish (amid parenting a toddler who spent a year fighting bedtime with every increasingly iron-strong fiber of his being, in a new country, while doing battle with plumbing and paperwork, the twin poles of the Paris hazing ritual.) BUT. I am proud of how it came out, and I’m excited to go on the road (rails) and talk about it at the end of the month.
Confirmed for now are dates in DURHAM on September 26th, at Collected Books, then LIVERPOOL on Friday 27th, at The Reader Bookshop, Mansion House, Calderstones Park.
Needless to say, I would be over the moon to meet any readers there. And if you aren’t able to make it to an event, but would like to pre-order the book, here’s a handy link to the UK Bookshop site, and the publisher’s site for more information and buying links.