Adventures in [Woke] Bookstores

My Search for That Mysterious Thing We Once Called Serious Art

Well, I’ve been sending out emails (100 so far) to bookstores around the country, trying to get them to sell The Crew, my punk-literary novel, available HERE on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Baker & Taylor, Smashwords, Fable, and many other places (including Goodreads).

So far emails have gone out to bookstores in Ventura, Ojai, the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Chicago, San Diego, Idaho, Montana. Plenty more to go out.

Unsurprisingly and yet somehow still surprisingly, I have been faced with one of the saddest truths in the contemporary American literary landscape: Art is dead. From insisting that readers and writers care deeply about BLM, being a feminist or being Pro-Palestine and Anti-Israel, to same re “antiracism,” to making it clear that a certain bookstore was for women and “non-binary” writers and that they’d consider a male writer but his work would have to be really really really exceptionally good.

More than once the words “Is this even legal” flitted through my tired, irritated mind. At one store I made the mistake of clicking under the “YA/For Kids” section on the website and was greeted with pure satire: A way, way too long list of every non-white demographic just to make sure that you know that THEY know that being white is evil.

When did this all happen? Look, I have no beef whatsoever with bookstores marketing non-white writers. Please do so. And yes, I recognize the dreaded “historical imbalance.” I grasp the nuanced, complex context of literary (not to mention social) history and how it’s been “before.”

But that is not a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.