Hi all,
My novel has been out for five months now. It got some good reviews, including from The New York Times, Harper’s, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. My friend Jeremy made me a snazzy new website (petercbaker.com); if you’re interested, you can find links to the reviews there. I did some readings and talks, and one of them––a talk with the author Phil Klay, facilitated by The Point magazine––is still watchable online.
Around publication time, I wrote a piece for the New Yorker about the prolific manuscript thief who, way back before the novel had sold, duped me into sending it to him. I also interviewed the book’s cover designer, my old friend Linda Huang, about her process.
Despite the book’s ripe old age, it is still available for purchase. If you’d like a signed copy, get in touch––in the Chicago area––with Bookends & Beginnings, Exile in Bookville, Squeezebox, The Book Cellar, Seminary Co-op. If you’re in the Bay Area, they have some at City Lights. Alternately, if you buy the book and you’d like my signature in it, let me know and I’ll mail you a signed bookplate.
I’ve done some magazine writing since, but I haven’t done many of these newsletters. I think the adrenaline rush of publication sapped the pool of energy I use for sharing my work. But I’d like to pick it up again: I’ve always enjoyed sending these, getting responses, etc. I often share work on Twitter, but now that Elon Musk has taken it over I’m thinking of giving it up. I’ve written a fair amount about Musk, and what I’ve realized over and over again is that it’s generally not a good idea to use his products. Plus, I’m hoping to make some real progress on another novel before February, when we’re having another baby.
So maybe I’ll be sending more newsletters.
In that spirit:
1) For the “Screenland” column in this upcoming weekend’s New York Times Magazine, I wrote about “The Playlist,” a new Netflix show about the rise of Spotify, using it as a jumping-off point to talk about our love of tech underdog stories, which, lately, have become the perfect embodiment of our inability to imagine progress.
2) For The New Yorker, I riffed on strollers, with some help from a recent book on the subject. Consider this part of my ongoing attempt to find as many ways as possible to write about how walking is good, and how dumb it is that America makes walking––and many other basic, safe, healthy, non-carbon-spewing activities––so hard.
This is something I’ve been writing about since 2019, when I published a Guardian piece about the pedestrian fatality crisis, and about the delusion of people––Elon Musk included––who think they can fix it by getting us to buy new kinds of cars.
I’ll try to keep this up in the weeks and months to come. In the meantime, be in touch. —Peter