Welcome to Litsy!

#BookMail
This unexpectedly arrived today from my #HajarPress subscription 💛💙💛 I like their distinctive cover designs, which alternate between yellow with dark blue designs and vice versa.
This one is a series of essays and diary entries by the author about their recovery from addiction, and how that intersects with capitalism. Despite my other reading commitments, as this one is relatively short - 113 pages - I'm going to start on into it. ⬇️

#BookMail My #HajarPress subscription book arrived today, this one being (as far as I can tell before reading it) a series of meditations on collective grief by a sociologist and "one of the leading academics on race". Which sounds very worthy and, possibly, dry, but having a riffle through it looks rather personal and emotive.?
Hajar ask their authors to give a playlist to their work, and this one is rather encouraging: Spotify link in comments.

#BookMail from my #HajarPress subscription, a novel set in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.
#BookHaul I let out a little squeal in the bookshop when I saw Ancient Sorceries! 🤭 I don't think anyone heard!
Greene's Journey Without Maps was a gamble as it's a 1930s white man's African travelogue, but I love the 1949 Pan cover, & reviews are positive.
Talking of Pan, Theocritus' Idylls caught my eye, then I caught it.
The Leduc sounds gritty & poignant.

My #HajarPress subscription brought me this surprise today. The cover blurb doesn't exactly clarify the book's contents, but it's a mix of stories & essays by Nuallak, who is an artist and writer. Their other writings seem mainly to have been stories anthologised in sci fi collections, so I'm expecting at least some of that. I've only read the introduction so far, which has me chuckling a couple of times and created a good vibe, so I'm hopeful 😊

#HajarPress I'm looking for hope in this one. I'm sure it will be necessary to outline the exploitation & oppression of the prison system, but I'm hoping for a focus on the change process.
I did some support work in state prisons a few years ago, and my limited experience was of generally well-meaning prison staff wanting to make a positive difference to prisoners in a system which doesn't give a fuck about them, whether inside gaol or out of it.