A Very Fine Announcement
My new book, VERY FINE PEOPLE, is now available for presale. It comes out on June 25, 2024. Read on for more details.
This essay has been cross-posted on Substack. Visit The Reframe to see it on the main site.
Hey everyone, Very Fine People releases on June 25, and the paperback version is available for presale right now! (eBook preorders will be available later this month.) You can preorder it any of the places where books are sold, and if you go and order it you'll be doing the thing that helps authors more than anything else you can do. Preorders make bookstores and other instruments of publishing take notice. I would love it if you helped this book make a major splash.
I've been working on this book for about seven years—almost certainly longer than you've been reading anything I write. I have thoughts and feelings about that, but first let's get business out of the way.
Ways you can preorder the paperback edition
Click here for PERSONALIZED SIGNED COPIES. This will place a preorder order to my local independent bookseller, Schuler Books. They're great folks, so you'll be helping them out, too. Put your request for a personalized inscription in the "order comments" field at checkout, and I'll honor it (within reason).
GET A PERSONALIZED SIGNED COPY OF VERY FINE PEOPLE
If you don't care about a personalized signed edition (or you're outside of the U.S. and would like to avoid big shipping costs), I recommend that you call your local bookseller and ask them to preorder a copy. Give them the ISBN (979-8-9899949-0-8) if they ask. This will have the added benefit of letting your local bookseller know that there is an author named A.R. Moxon and there is interest in him—and, if you would like an author named A.R. Moxon to be invited by your local bookseller to give a reading, that is exactly how that sort of thing happens.
If it's your jam, you can also place online orders on the big places like Amazon and Barnes & Noble (links go to U.S. sites, but it's available in other markets too).
Anticipating FAQs ...
The eBook is coming soon. I'll announce it when it does, probably in 1-2 weeks. It also will be available in all the usual ways.
Hardcover and audiobook will be dependent on how the paperback and eBook sell. I'm out of pocket for this (again, relying upon Founding Members to even be able to do that), so before I undertake other time-intensive expense like producing an audio version I need to know how this thing is going to go. I don't have a hard-and-fast number for when it will be "go-time" for an audio edition, but I'll know it when I see it, and I really do hope that I see it.
And now some quick thoughts about Very Fine People ...
Very Fine People is a book of essays, in case you didn't know. Most of them have been published online in one place or another. Many of them first saw the light right here in The Reframe, though many others predate the newsletter. Maybe you read them when they came out. Maybe you didn't. Maybe pickles make a sandwich taste good. There are so many possibilities in this universe.
These are very particular essays, which I've picked up and assembled in a different way than you may have read them back then, if you did so. They represent my attempt to put my worldview back together when the old one shattered. The old one shattered because I had been clinging to a false notion about a lot of people and institutions in my life. I had believed that when a lot of people and institutions in my life—people who had been accommodating white supremacy and many other bigotries—were finally confronted with incontrovertible evidence of the ugliness they were supporting, they would at last turn away from it in revulsion.
And, when the incontrovertible proof arrived, some did turn away in revulsion—a few. Only a few. Mostly, though ... well. You remember.
The result of the Trump years showed me a far different reality, one that I could not deny, even as I turned in revulsion: the people and institutions in my life knew full well about the ugliness they were supporting, and all the most ugly things were thing things they wanted the most; the bigotries were not the things they were overlooking, but the things they were anticipating, the things they were hungry for, and when somebody finally came along with absolutely no redeeming qualities to offer it for them in the most maximally ignorant and cruel way imaginable, they treated it like the salvation they had been waiting for.
And that sort of ruined me for a little while. I no longer understood what I understood. The things I knew didn't fit together anymore; they were like puzzle pieces that had been thrown into a box with 7 other puzzles and turned cardboard-side-up.
Maybe some of you have a similar experience, in which case this book might read a bit like a horror story at times.
And, I know, some of you always knew this, and were just waiting for fools like me to catch up, and so to you this book may read like a grim comedy.
In any case, when my worldview shattered, I did what I do: I started writing. That's my way of turning puzzle pieces over and categorizing them and fitting them back together until a picture starts to form.
The questions I tried to answer were: how did we get here? So, in Very Fine People, you'll find my diagnosis of the dominant empowered cultural spirit in the United States; a spirit that is horribly sick with a terrible viral disease called supremacy, and a cancerous metastasizing of a financial organ called capital—an organ which may or may not serve a function, but which in healthy times is very smaller and heavily regulated by other more useful organs.
And then, because I know that simply pointing to the problem is useful, but more useful is contemplating some way to fix it, I tried to answer the question what do we do about it? So, in Very Fine People, you'll find some useful tools that I've discovered; universally accessible tools that I think might start to heal the sickness I see, which I think of as primarily a mutated spiritual virus called supremacism and an aggressive widespread spiritual cancer called capitalanoma; a sickness of our dominant empowered national spirit, or our dominant empowered national belief system, if you like.
I'm still at it.
Unless you know me personally, the odds are good that I've been writing this for at least as long as you've been reading anything I write. I started in late 2016 and published the first bit in January 2017, a few days before Donald Trump took office. It took me a very long time to write, because it took me a very long time to understand what I now understood.
I'm still not there, honestly—not even close. There are still many things that I don't understand about what I understand. This is a journey, and I'm still a fool, and the darkness we're facing is very dark indeed. But Very Fine People is a decent snapshot of the farthest point I've come so far, and I have to say, looking back, that I've come a long way, which is encouraging. Putting my thoughts into some sort of order was very helpful for me, and when I share them, a lot of you tell me that it is helpful for you as well. So I'm glad to keep putting those thoughts out there.
When I started, I didn't have an audience at all. Now, I have all of you, and that fills my heart, no matter what happens with this book.
Tomorrow I'll be posting the first chapter to the newsletter as a preview.
See you tomorrow.
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A.R. Moxon is the author of The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the upcoming essay collection Very Fine People, which you can learn about how to support right here. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He needs a miracle every day.
Congratulations on the second book, Andrew! I'm super excited to read it. If it's even a quarter as good as your first book, it will be amazing.