Resistance on the rise
Anti-Trump fervour spurs spate of new books
NEW YORK At The Booksmith in San Francisco, they’re trying to keep up with all the anti-Trump releases and other works of the “resistance.”
“It’s staggering, the number of books,” says store manager and leader buyer Camden Avery. “Politics has a much more prominent place in our store and for our customers than we’ve had for a long time.”
The rise of Donald Trump has been mirrored by an expanding literary genre that will intensify this year, with dozens of new works expected, on top of the dozens from 2017. Books of “resistance” will include guides to activism, reflections on democracy, investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election and legal analysis, along with poetry and fiction.
Trump’s election revived interest in such classic dystopian novels as 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale. An upcoming compilation, It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art, also uses narrative as a form of social consciousness. The book, which will help support the American Civil Liberties Union, includes original material by such popular authors as Neil Gaiman and Mary Higgins Clark.
“I asked that contributors write stories and fiction because I didn’t want more political rhetoric,” says editor Jonathan Santlofer. “I wanted to do something people would enjoy reading and holding and looking at. A story is something that can convey feeling and even a message without being more polemic.”
This month marks not just the one-year anniversary of Trump’s presidency, but also of the massive women’s marches staged the day after his inauguration. Together We Rise: Behind the Scenes at the Protest Heard Around the World includes essays by Roxane Gay, Ashley Judd and America Ferrera. Keep Marching: How Every Woman Can Take Action and Change Our World, by activist and speaker Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, features “proven tactics, policy solutions and strategies any woman can use to build her power.”
Several new works will address challenges to our system of government.
How Democracies Die, by Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, traces the demise of political rights in countries around the world. Canadian David Frum’s Trumpocracy warns against the “complacent optimism” that U.S. politics are immune from fatal damage. Amy Siskind’s The List compiles her widely read online annal of breaks from democratic tradition in 2017. Timothy Snyder is following his bestselling On Tyranny, a brief handbook about signs of authoritarianism, with The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Snyder is a history professor at Yale University and his new book looks at threats to democracy in the U.S. and overseas.
Labelling a “resistance” book can be as challenging as defining the resistance movement.
Disdain for the president is the unifier for authors who might otherwise have little to say to each other, from Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Khan-Cullors, whose memoir When They Call You a Terrorist is due this month, to Frum, a former George W. Bush speech writer; to author-journalist Sarah Kendzior, a commentator on authoritarianism whose 2015 ebook The View from Flyover Country is being reissued this spring in paperback.