Blog

By Frank Pester

Last year, we did not produce newsletters between February and June. This year, there are no gatherings or in-person author events scheduled for March and April. We are still living in pandemic times. At this anniversary of the onset of the global crisis named CoViD-19, we are different people. I am grateful that our staff and bookstore have remained uninfected. Our masks, sanitization and distancing measures are designed to keep it that way.

"'We optimise as others breathe! We are the first generation to so perfectly 'internalise' all behaviours as scarcity behaviours! Nothing escapes this, including relationship problems, suicide, altruism previously confiscate by the intoxicating theories of the Pétroleuses.

'Take relationships, for example... Doesn't getting married mean coming up against a specific market of goods and services along withs its rules, investments (children) and its competition for rare resources (IQ, sex appeal, education, wealth) that stroke the utility curves in the right direction? Can a couple last if it doesn't suceed in increasing the utility function of both partners?'"

-Gilles Châtelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs, p. 111

After weeks of selling books from behind closed doors we are happy to welcome you back into our bookstore.

There's something monstrous in your lower back. Is it apostate to your conscious self? A review of Katy Mongeau's Apostasy probably won't answer that question, but the poetry might.

This is the first newsletter we’ve produced since the world was changed by pandemic earlier this year and writing it was not easy. Our culture is stretched with conflict, insecurity and division and I have lost faith in national and local leaders and the ability of American institutions to steward us sanely through this turmoil.

What I write here doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of the owners of Weller Book Works or those of my colleagues, but I know that each of us is devoted to some idea of racial justice in a country where, even since its inception, violence, exploitation, and colonial nightmares have ruled the day.

At first, B. R. Yeager’s Negative Space assumes nothing more than the garb of your typical, formulaic horror novel.

Mike Corrao’s Smut-Maker: The Erotics of Vomit and Jazz will infect you and all other media you encounter.

It is a viral, noxious fetish object.

If I described a world in lockdown due to a deadly virus and the majority of people unable to be tested, as well as impending economic doom and a recent earthquake to boot, you might think I’m describing a low-budget apocalypse movie starring Nicholas Cage. 

But, you know as well as I do that this is real life.