IP Picks🔎: A 'Footloose' for the Trans Age
➕ A mercenary's memoir and a fun soapy murder mystery set in a tech startup
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
Almost everywhere you turn the rancorous debate about Hamas' terrorist incursion into Israel and Israel's response into Gaza pops up — on college campuses, in schools, just out on the street. I can't ever recall a foreign event not directly involving the United States creating so many bitterly heated exchanges as this one.
Publishing is no exception. The National Book Awards were given out Wednesday, Nov. 15, in a ceremony hosted by LeVar Burton in New York (and live streamed). In advance of the ceremony, Aaliyah Bilal, an African American Sunni Muslim who was a finalist for her debut story collection, Temple Folk, said she would speak out about the conflict, and rumors circulated that others would as well.
Zibby Media, a sponsor of the awards, withdrew. Company founder Zibby Owens wrote on Substack that she heard "all the nominees of the awards had gotten together as a block and decided to use their platform when winning speeches to promote a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel agenda. She didn't want to "to be subsidizing an event that’s being used as a platform to fuel hate and divisiveness." (Disclosure: The Ankler is partnered with Zibby's Bookstore in Santa Monica on a series of book talks.) Book of the Month, another sponsor, didn’t withdraw financial support, but executives decided not to attend.
Burton, long a passionate opponent of book bans, opened the event by saying, “Books are being banned, words are being silenced, and writers and others who champion books are under attack. There is a reason I believe why books are under attack—it’s because they are so powerful." Oprah Winfrey, who was feted as the ceremony’s “special guest,” echoed Burton and added a defense of the importance of “diverse books.”
But the night ended with fiction prize winner Justin Torres (Blackouts) inviting other finalists on stage to stand with Bilal as she read a statement calling for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza and opposing “antisemitism and anti-Palestinian sentiment and Islamophobia equally, accepting the human dignity of all parties.”
Authors have often used the NBA ceremony to speak out, but in the past the topics were ones broadly supported by the literary community. Last year, several criticized Republican-led book efforts in schools and supported striking workers at HarperCollins. After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, others, notably Colson Whitehead, spoke out about his win. Indeed, earlier this year, the National Book Foundation, which runs the awards, dropped Drew Barrymore as host after she announced that filming would resume on her eponymous talk show despite the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. (Barrymore reversed the decision after a furious backlash from writers and actors.)
The NBA controversy follows one at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the largest and arguably most important literary gathering in the world. Adania Shibli, a Palestinian author who splits her time between Berlin and Jerusalem, was set to receive a prize from the German literary association Litprom for literature from the developing world by a female author, awarded for her well-received novel Minor Details that fictionalizes a real-life 1948 gang rape of an Arab girl by Israeli soldiers, and a Palestinian woman's attempt to investigate it in the present. The prize is usually presented at Frankfurt, but Litprom postponed the ceremony (not the award) "due to the war started by Hamas, under which millions of people in Israel and Palestine are suffering.”
Litprom's decision provoked a furious backlash from a contingent of celebrated authors. Some 600, including Nobel winners Abdulrazak Gurnah, Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk, issued an open letter that said in part, "The Frankfurt Book Fair has a responsibility, as a major international book fair, to be creating spaces for Palestinian writers to share their thoughts, feelings, reflections on literature through these terrible, cruel times, not shutting them down." Others, including the Malaysian government, boycotted the Fair. Ironically, the Fair gave its peace prize this year to Salman Rushdie, the acclaimed author who has become a poster boy for literary free speech since Ayatollah Khomeini called for his assassination in 1989 because of his novel The Satanic Verses.
As with so much of the thoughtful commentary on the conflict, what was actually said by Bilal at the NBA ceremony was pretty innocuous. What's really interesting to me is both how much people are talking about what's going on in Israel and Gaza and the level of anxiety and emotion in every conversation. I'm sure you've seen it as well. Everyone wants to talk about what's going. I can't count the number of conversations I've had with friends and professional acquaintances, people I don't usually talk politics with, about the events of the last month. Conversations that usually begin with the other person bringing it up. I think a lot of people have been surprised at the vocal support of many young people for the Palestinian cause, support that some think has veered into calls for Israel's destruction and antisemitism. For others, it brought to the fore nagging fears about rising antisemitism in the United States going back to at least the odious 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
The immediate crisis will recede as all crises do, but it remains to be seen if what's happening is just a flare up or signals a lasting shift in U.S. Middle East policy, the political power of Arab Americans and public acceptance of antisemitism. The publishing controversy will fade pretty fast, but I'm curious to see how Hollywood digests this. Will we see a change in how Jewish characters are portrayed on screen? Will we see more and more diverse Arab and Arab American representation on screen? Will audiences show an interest in scripted and unscripted stories about the American role in the Middle East? I tend to think the lasting effects of the last month will be short-lived, but the backlash against Israel is new and different in a way that undermines my confidence in that prediction.
On to this week’s picks, which include a feel-good story about a high school musical and a fantastic darkly comic memoir from a former Blackwater mercenary:
A thriller centered on a young woman whose efforts to hide from a stalker are complicated by a true crime podcast investigating her story.
A darkly funny drama about working for Blackwater during the height of the Iraq War in the early 2000s.
A juicy thriller about the murder of a tech executive and the secrets behind the company’s success .
An inspirational dramedy about a small-town high school musical under attack for casting a trans kid in the lead.
