 An angel leading a soul – possibly a reader – into hell. Oil on wood painted by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch. (Photo credit: Wellcome Collection) | I've been reading Dante's "Inferno" to reassure myself that there's some place hotter than here. But friends in the Pacific Northwest are already in the ninth circle of hell. On Monday, Portland baked in 116 degrees. Powell's, the legendary Oregon bookstore, was hoping for a hot 50th anniversary celebration in 2021, but not like this. Just as the state was planning to lift most covid-19 restrictions, the heat turned Portland into a toaster oven. Suddenly, Powell's was not only a literary oasis; it was an actual oasis. Bryanne Hoeg, manager of Powell's main branch, tells me, "We were worried for our customers, but everything went smoothly. Our air conditioning held up, so it was really nice to be a bit of a safe spot for people to get out of the heat." While maintaining social distancing, Hoeg was able to increase the store's occupancy limits so that no one had to wait outside in the sun. "We also provided water for anyone who needed it," she said, "and some extra seating for folks. There were a few people who were overheated, you know, which is to be expected." In a city where many residents don't have air conditioning, that was a big draw. But Hoeg knows people are craving more than just cooler temperatures. "When it's hot," she says, "you still need to escape, and at least by reading, you're entertained, and your brain is busy — you're not thinking of the misery of the heat." Or, as Dante put it, "Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars."  Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka and Peter Ostrum as Charlie Bucket in the 1971 film "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." (Warner Bros./Reuters) | "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," starring Gene Wilder, opened in theaters 50 years ago this week (story). I was in grade school when my mom took me to see it. Violet Beauregarde's transformation into a giant blueberry left me with a pathological fear of chewing gum. But otherwise, I was smitten with Wilder's quirky antics and Roald Dahl's menacing humor. "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" — the novel and the subsequent movie adaptation — endured a tortuous path to success. Dahl was infuriated that British publishers, inhibited by what he called their "priggish, obtuse, stuffiness," were so reluctant to buy his manuscript. But when the book finally appeared in 1964, it sold quickly in the U.S. and U.K. Still, Dahl's authorized biographer, Donald Sturrock, notes that he had a reputation as a "dangerous oddball. . . removed from the respectable literary mainstream." Librarians were hostile to "Charlie," Sturrock writes, considering the book "brash" and "tasteless." Many refused to put it on their shelves. (Thirty years ago, Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda wrote an insightful essay titled "The Disturbing Mr. Dahl.") "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" inspired more damning protests as soon as plans for a movie were announced. The NAACP objected to Dahl's portrayal of the Oompa-Loompas as African Pygmies. Critics said that detail was racist. It was, but privately Dahl complained that his detractors were behaving like Nazis. (Dahl's problem with Jews is a matter for another depressing story.) In any event, he agreed to remove the African element; in the movie, you'll remember, the Oompa-Loompas are orange. (Ironically, Dahl had originally conceived of Charlie as a Black boy.) Even before the movie was released, Dahl was sorely disappointed with it. He didn't like Wilder or the director or the music or his own script, which had been rewritten slightly or substantially — opinions differ — by David Seltzer. "It would prove," Sturrock writes, "his final foray into movies as a writer." So much success amid so much disgruntlement: It's a tragicomedy worthy of Roald Dahl.  Canadian spoken-word poet Brian Lanigan on a loveseat designed and created by Charlotte Carbone. (Photo courtesy of IKEA) | This week, Brian Lanigan became the most famous sofa poet in the world. Take a seat and let me explain. To celebrate Pride month, IKEA Canada created 10 unique loveseats inspired by the flags of 2SLGBTQ+ identities. "There's more to Pride than a rainbow," the company said in a statement unveiling these works of art, which are not for sale. One of the sofas — the Bisexual Love Seat, created by queer fashion designer Charlotte Carbone — is covered with handprints. But what really caught the Twittersphere's attention was the back cushions emblazoned with the words, "When you change OR to AND / nobody believes you." Social media exploded with explication de textile. That line comes from a Canadian spoken-word poet named Brian Lanigan. More than 10 years ago, when he was in high school, Lanigan wrote a poem exploring his bisexual identity. The poem begins, "'Who you are isn't real,' he said, as if I had given him the power to rule over my identity, to measure me up and find me wanting." Lanigan performed the poem at the 2015 Toronto Poetry Slam Finals. When the IKEA project started up, a mutual friend put him in touch with the designer. His line of verse on the Love Seat "describes bisexual erasure," Lanigan tells me. "The cushion that's been identified as the 'Nobody Believes You' cushion is something that I was told repeatedly by multiple people — people I cared about — growing up as a bisexual person, trying to live authentically." When he arrived for the IKEA photoshoot in Toronto and saw the finished loveseat for the first time, it was an emotional experience. "In person, it was so stunning," Lanigan says. "To see this thing — this really negative thing that happened to me — flipped into something beautiful and positive, I thought was beautiful." Will upholstery lead to publication? "Oh," he laughs, "I have not even begun to think that far ahead."  Secretary of the Smithsonian Lonnie G. Bunch III talks with former President Barack Obama during the American Library Association conference that streamed on June 29, 2021. (Video image courtesy of the ALA) | Barack Obama may have served as president of the United States, but now he's looking forward to a role of supreme importance: librarian. At the American Library Association conference on Tuesday, outgoing ALA president Julius Jefferson noted that the Obama Presidential Center will begin construction in Chicago later this year, and he introduced Obama as "one of our own." In a streamed conversation with Lonnie G. Bunch III, the Secretary of the Smithsonian, Obama talked about our fraught political moment and his best-selling memoir "A Promised Land" (review). Deftly puncturing right-wing hysteria over renewed attempts to acknowledge and correct systemic racism, Obama noted that James Baldwin's 1963 book, "The Fire Next Time," could have been written last week. "The same underlying forces are still at work," he said. "How do we deal with difference? How do we deal with a legacy of caste and oppression, even among well-meaning people we still carry with us? The fact that certain parts of our society were excluded from occupations, were excluded from the ability to accumulate wealth, were excluded from housing in certain neighborhoods — all that stuff adds up. And we don't have to presume that racism has the same sharp edge as it did 50 years ago to acknowledge and recognize that all that accumulated discrimination is reflected in our social and institutional arrangements today." Let's pause for a moment and try to imagine a society that could have an intelligent conversation about that. Obama expressed deep concern about "the degree to which misinformation is now disseminated" quickly and in coordinated ways. "If I learned one thing during my presidency," he said, "it's the power of stories. And since we're talking to a bunch of librarians, I just want to let them know what they do is more important than ever: figuring out how do we provide our fellow citizens with a shared set of baseline narratives around which we can make our democracy work."  Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden presents the 2021 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction to Joy Williams. (Photo by Robert Casper/The Library of Congress) | Joy Williams has won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. The lifetime achievement award, announced Wednesday by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, recognizes a U.S. writer whose work has "told us something essential about the American experience." Williams is known primarily for her short stories, which have appeared in five collections, most recently "The Visiting Privilege." In a review for The Washington Post, Lisa Zeidner wrote, "Williams is unrivaled in her depiction of a profound, inarticulate, almost painterly loneliness" (review). Acknowledging the prize in a statement released by the Library, Williams said, "This is a wonderful award and one that inspires much humility. The American story is wild, uncapturable and discomfiting, and our fiction — our literature — is poised to challenge and deeply change us as it becomes ever more inclusive and ecocentric." Nominations for the Prize for American Fiction come from more than 60 writers and critics around the world. (Disclosure: I'm one of them.) A video of Williams accepting this year's award will be streamed during the National Book Festival, which begins Sept. 17. Happily, that's the same week Williams is set to release her fifth novel, a post-apocalyptic story called "Harrow." We don't hear that word much these days, except in the adjective "harrowing," which is a good description of Williams's work.  (Tim Duggan Books; Pantheon; Avon; Chronicle Books) | Other literary awards and honors this week: - In this most Orwellian era, the Orwell Foundation strives to "promote Orwell's values of integrity, decency and fidelity to truth." The nonprofit group in London recently conferred its annual Political Writing Book Prize on "Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia," by the New Yorker's Moscow correspondent Joshua Yaffa. The Political Fiction Book Prize went to "Summer," the final volume of Ali Smith's seasonal quartet (review).
- Last year was so bad that the Bad Sex in Fiction Award was canceled. But the sheets are heating up in 2021. On Wednesday, editor Rachel Kramer Bussel and a story platform called the Good Bits mounted their first annual Good Sex Awards. The contest — to celebrate the best writing about "consent, feminism and body positivity" — included 10 spicy categories, eight of which made me realize my life has been even more boring than I suspected. The prize for Best Sexy Talk went to "You Had Me at Hola," a rom-com by Alexis Daria. The Post included that novel on our list of "15 feel-good books guaranteed to lift your spirits" (full list). And just last month, we recommended Daria's sequel, "A Lot Like Adiós" (review).
- This week Stephen Fry published "Troy," the third volume in his best-selling Greek Myths Reimagined series — following "Mythos" and "Heroes." Anyone who fell in love with Edith Hamilton's "Mythology" back in the day should check out these handsome new books from Fry about "those interfering over-excitable Olympian gods." (Next month, my brother is getting the whole set for his birthday. Shhhhh.) Modern-day Athenians are excited about the series, too. Earlier this year, the Greek government named Fry a Commander of the Order of the Phoenix "for his contribution in enhancing knowledge about Greece." Accepting the award, Fry noted that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling did not invent the Order of the Phoenix. "It truly exists," he tweeted. "Thrilled & deeply honoured to have the REAL one conferred upon me."
 (Courtesy of Catapult) | If you're an aspiring writer, you've chased your tale around this cruel maxim: To publish a book, you must have an agent, and to get an agent, you must have published a book. Soft Skull Press, an imprint of Catapult, wants to shake that process up, at least for a few weeks. From now until July 20, this small but highly respected publisher will accept — and read! — manuscripts submitted directly by authors. This is your chance to jump out of the slush pile. Mensah Demary, the new editor in chief at Soft Skull, tells me he's trying to "open up another channel, albeit temporarily, for authors to be able to submit and, hopefully, find something that could work for our listing in the coming years." Demary and his team are particularly interested in manuscripts from people in underrepresented groups of "any race, gender, age, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, class, and physical or mental ability." Of course, the risk of being buried with submissions is real, but Demary thinks it's worth it. "If you want to bring in different authors from different backgrounds," he says, "that might require a different approach to engaging these authors." There is no submission fee, and if your manuscript is accepted, you'll be offered a standard publishing contract. (Contact an agent before signing it.) If you're interested, look over Soft Skull's book list and decide whether your manuscript would be a good match. You can find more information about the submission process here.  From a now-deleted tweet by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (Via Twitter) | Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey once said, "If you weren't from the South and you went down there and just looked around at the landscape, you might think that the South won the war." In her 2020 memoir, "Memorial Drive," Trethewey describes Stone Mountain, America's largest monument to the Confederacy, as "a lasting metaphor for the white mind of the South . . . the nostalgic dream of Southern heroism and gallantry" (review). This week, Congress took a small, tardy step toward correcting that reverently maintained misimpression. On Tuesday, the House voted to rid the Capital of statues honoring racists and traitors (story). The bill now goes to the Senate where it faces an uphill battle. But even as our country tries to correct its history in stone, opposing forces are working furiously to make sure "the nostalgic dream of Southern heroism and gallantry" remains undisturbed in our textbooks. Alarmed by the effectiveness of the Black Lives Matter movement, White supremacists and GOP politicians hoping to ride their robetails have soaked the country in ridiculous, deceitful claims about an arcane academic approach called critical race theory. As Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson says, "Republicans' hissy fit over critical race theory . . . is all about alarming White voters into believing that they are somehow threatened if our educational system makes any meaningful attempt to teach the facts of the nation's long struggle with race" (column). The latest example of that corrosive absurdity comes from the Texas Public Policy Foundation. On Wednesday, this nonprofit group, which has the audacity to claim that it's a "non-partisan research institute," tweeted out a list of terms to help parents "stay on the lookout" for cleverly disguised critical race theory that's creeping into schools and poisoning children's minds. Among the subversive words that Mom and Dad need to watch for are "diversity," "social justice," "prejudice," "colonialism," "white supremacy" and "liberation." The Texas Public Policy Foundation rightly deleted its tweet after it inspired a torrent of mockery. But vague and poorly conceived laws against talking critically about racism have already been passed in many Republican-controlled states — some with fines as high as $5,000 per free thought. Our History and English teachers are being set up for a disastrously litigious fall term.  A Freeman's auctioneer presides over the record-breaking sale of a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on July 1, 2021. (Photo courtesy of Freeman's) | Someone has an extra reason to celebrate this 4th of July. Yesterday, an anonymous buyer paid $4.42 million for an exceedingly rare copy of the Declaration of Independence. This vellum document is one of the so-called Stone Engravings. In 1823, under a commission from Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, William J. Stone completed a copper plate engraving of the original, badly faded Declaration. Two of the 200 copies made from that plate were presented to Charles Carroll III, the last surviving signer of the Declaration. One of Carroll's copies of the Declaration of Independence ended up in the Maryland Historical Society, but the other copy was presumed lost for more than 175 years – until it was rediscovered in Scotland. This week's sale was conducted by Freeman's in Philadelphia. The auction house had estimated Carroll's copy of the Declaration would sell for about $800,000, but the $4.42 million winning bid is, according to a statement from Freeman's, "the highest price ever paid at auction for an American document printed in the 19th century." For the July 4 holiday, the buyer has loaned this piece of our history to the National Park Service to display at Philadelphia's Second Bank of the United States.  Illustration by Emma Roulette for The Washington Post | Let's jumpstart summer reading! Later today, the Book World staff will be online to chat and answer any questions you may have. Looking for the next thrilling mystery novel? Trying to find a fun book for your reluctant reader? Need an audiobook to keep the whole family entranced during a long car trip? We're ready with great suggestions about anything and everything. It'll also be a nice chance for you to meet my incredibly talented and knowledgeable colleagues. To participate in the Book World live chat at 3 p.m. today, click here.  University of Virginia Press | Last fall, editor Kim Roberts published an illuminating anthology called "By Broad Potomac's Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of Our Nation's Capital." Some of the poets are familiar — Francis Scott Key, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass — but many were new to me. Each is presented with a helpful, brief biography. As befits our complicated history, the poems present a remarkable range of themes about America, from grand to intimate, from wildly celebratory to scathingly critical. Anne Lynch Botta is one of many poets I was happy to discover in this volume. She served as Sen. Henry Clay's personal secretary in Washington in the early 1850s. She was also, according to Roberts, an accomplished writer. In a review of her 1849 collection, "Poems," Edgar Allan Poe claimed that he knew of no verses in America "superior to them." In the Library Speak low, tread softly through these halls;
Here genius lives enshrined,
Here reign, in silent majesty,
The monarchs of the mind. A mighty spirit-host they come
From every age and clime;
Above the buried wrecks of years
They breast the tide of Time. And in their presence-chamber here
They hold their regal state,
And round them throng a noble train,
The gifted and the great. O child of earth, when round thy path
The storms of life arise,
And when thy brothers pass thee by
With stern, unloving eyes— Here shall the Poets chant for thee
Their sweetest, loftiest lays;
And Prophets wait to guide thy steps
In wisdom's pleasant ways. Come, with these God-anointed kings,
By thou companion here,
And in the mighty realm of mind
Thou shalt go forth a peer. From "By Broad Potomac's Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of Our Nation's Capital," edited by Kim Roberts (University of Virginia Press). Reprinted with permission of the publisher.  The Washington Monument getting struck by lightning on July 1, 2005. (File photo by Kevin Ambrose for The Washington Post) | Forgive me if this week's newsletter feels a bit rushed. A series of apocalyptic storms crashed through Washington yesterday afternoon, knocking out the electric power to my house. After waiting around for a while looking for a rainbow, I raced to the public library to keep working. But the library, as you may have heard, is full of books, and I am easily distracted. Also, after a couple of hours, a librarian came on over the loudspeaker and announced that the storm had flooded the bathrooms, so we should "plan ahead." (Alas, that's not how going to the bathroom works. . . .) In any case, the power eventually came back on at home, and here we are, such as we are. Don't make me remind you that this newsletter is free. Meanwhile, if you have any questions or comments about our book coverage, send a note to ron.charles@washpost.com. And if you know friends who would enjoy this newsletter, please forward it to them. To subscribe, click here.
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