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1 week ago | 
books.substack.com | Ann Kjellberg
Susana Monsó is a Spanish philosophy professor who has written a book, Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death. It has a bright pink cover and has received an inordinately respectful amount of attention.
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2 weeks ago | 
books.substack.com | Ann Kjellberg
I sometimes write on the top floor of an old Vermont woolen mill near its once necessary river. I fell for the space because I grew up in a New England factory town and my strongest ties connect to such buildings. I am always drawn to them, to what their emptiness holds still. I learned about the power of absence from my father, an industrial laborer who became a union organizer for the Chemical Workers Union.
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3 weeks ago | 
books.substack.com | Ann Kjellberg
I don’t recall paying much attention as a child in the late 1970s to the concept of trash—all the stuff we unthinkingly discard—except in connection with one Woodsy Owl.
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3 weeks ago | 
books.substack.com | Ann Kjellberg
Jack Boucher, Interior of classroom (1974). South Pass City, Fremont County, Wyoming. Library of CongressI have probably thought more about the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) than most people who aren’t librarians or museum personnel.
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4 weeks ago | 
books.substack.com | Ann Kjellberg
Wolkenstudie(ca. 1840), by Adalbert Stifter.
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1 month ago | 
books.substack.com | Ann Kjellberg
Strips (quilt), Annie May Young (c. 1975), one of the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of the Souls Grown Deep FoundationHello Readers!I am well and truly back. For those just joining, I took a little breather in posting new pieces recently while I recalibrated after seven or so hectic years of newslettering. (Book Post was actually born on Substack before it was even a thing.
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1 month ago | 
books.substack.com | Ann Kjellberg
Image: Necklace of red shell discs with pendants of shell, seeds and palm fiber, which circulated in the “kula ring” first described for scholarship by Bronislaw Malinowski in 1922. The kula ring is a system of ceremonial exchange linking the Massim island communities off the northeast coast of New Guinea. Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, UK. Lewis Hyde is the author of four books of nonfiction that are particularly hard to categorize.
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1 month ago | 
books.substack.com | Ann Kjellberg
Nearly thirty years ago, studying oral histories of the Holocaust, Lawrence L. Langer astutely pointed out a pitfall commonly encountered when examining the Nazi era. The people who took oral histories, he found, sometimes interrupted the survivors, or ignored the despair they voiced, because the interviewers were so eager to shape a story that ended with the joyful day of liberation from a concentration camp and the triumph of the human spirit.
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1 month ago | 
books.substack.com | Ann Kjellberg
I have pondered a great deal over a conversation I took part in a number of years ago in one of the offices of New York University. I had lived away from Kentucky for several years—in California, in Europe, in New York City. And now I had decided to go back and take a teaching job at the University of Kentucky, giving up the position I then held on the New York University faculty.
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1 month ago | 
books.substack.com | Ann Kjellberg
A New York Public Library bookmobile, circa 1910–1920Book Post is in the midst of a little pause, but we are re-upping some of our old favorites to keep our friends occupied. Here’s one from a few years back that we often find ourselves returning to.