Good morning. It's Monday, July 27, and it's supposed to be blazing hot today—hottest day of the year so far.
Also blazing hot? The talents of novelist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, whose fourth novel, The Freezer Door, comes out in November.
There's a blurb on it from Maggie Nelson (!!) that says: "In a happy paradox common to great literature, it’s a book about not belonging that made me feel deeply less alone... I stand deeply inspired and instructed by its great wit, candor, inventiveness, and majesty."
Mattilda reads a little from The Freezer Door in her message today, but first she cracks: "I wrote a book about alienation, and then everything got worse."
Maggie Nelson's quote above was condensed—it's so amazing, let's just see the full thing:
I really love Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door. In a happy paradox common to great literature, it’s a book about not belonging that made me feel deeply less alone. I so admire its appetite to get down and dirty, to wield non sequitur with grace and power, to ponder the past while sticking with the present, to quest unceasingly. I stand deeply inspired and instructed by its great wit, candor, inventiveness, and majesty.
You can follow Mattilda on Twitter.
You can read more about Mattilda's other books here.
Thank you, Mattilda, for your reading, and for this message, and for demonstrating how to wear a necktie in this heat.
We're off to find a freezer door to hide behind.
Good luck today, everyone.
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Previously in this series:
