#Emily Layden

[eretzyisrael]

by Jackie Hajdenberg

An authors’ panel at an Albany book festival Saturday has been canceled after organizers said two panelists refused to share a stage with the “Zionist” moderator.

Elisa Albert, who is Jewish, was set to moderate a panel at the Albany Book Festival on Saturday called “Girls, Coming of Age.” But on Thursday, she received an email from a festival organizer informing her that the event had been canceled: Two of the three panelists — authors Lisa Ko and Aisha Abdel Gawad — objected to sitting on the panel with Albert because they did not want to appear with a “Zionist.” The third panelist was to be Emily Layden.

Albert said the cancellation is of a piece with her experiences since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

“Unfortunately, I’m not surprised,” Albert told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday. “I’ve been really vocal from the get-go, and I’ve lost many friends. I’ve seen my whole professional life wildly altered. I’m not surprised at all. I’ve seen all kinds of people behaving in all kinds of ways that are on the spectrum of this exact same kind of bigotry, complicity, fear — all of it.”

Albert, who lives in Albany, first learned about the panelists’ objections on Thursday afternoon, when she got an email from Mark Koplik, the assistant director of the New York State Writers Institute, which is organizing the festival.

“We have a crazy situation developing and we’d love to talk on the phone,” Koplik wrote in a message that JTA obtained.

“Basically, not to sugar coat this, Aisha Gawad and Lisa Ko don’t want to be on a panel with a ‘Zionist,’” he added. “We’re taken by surprise, and somewhat nonplussed, and want to talk this out.”

By Thursday evening, Albert had been notified by Paul Grondahl, director of the Writers Institute, that the event had been canceled.

“We regret this situation, which was out of our control,” Grondahl wrote in an email obtained by JTA. “It is unfortunate for everyone involved.”

Grondahl added, “I wish this were otherwise. We will find a way to air these issues we have discussed in a deeper, more considered, more carefully planned event with intentionality and context.”

The cancellation of the panel is the latest in a long series of literary events to be upended or nixed because of disputes over the Israel-Hamas war and Zionism. Activists have sought to hinder the careers of authors they deem “Zionist,” many of whom have Jewish heritage.

In one notable recent instance, a launch event for Jewish journalist Joshua Leifer’s new book, “Tablets Shattered,” at a Brooklyn bookstore in August was canceled because one of its employees objected to the event’s “Zionist” rabbi moderator.

Some of those facing the criticism have not expressed public support for Israel. Gabrielle Zevin, who wrote the bestseller “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” for example, has faced calls for cancellation despite saying nothing publicly about Israel or the war.

Albert, on the other hand, has been an outspoken advocate for Israel since the outbreak of the war nearly a year ago. On Instagram, she has posted aggressively and frequently in support of Israel and against Hamas and those she perceives as supporting it, including pro-Palestinian protesters in the United States, whom she has called “terror apologists.”

On Friday afternoon, following the cancelation, she appeared to embrace the cancellation, posting an image of her latest book — “The Snarling Girl,” a collection of personal essays published last month — with the text, “Now’s as good a time as ever to promote Zio lit!” She later added a selfie with the text “Friendly local Zio bitch” over it.

[writingonleaves]

k's works in progress

below in no particular order and mostly to keep myself accountable, here's what's in the works right now in my land✨

*subject to change at any time*

so i’ll watch your life in pictures like i used to watch you sleep - melody lin x luca fantilli (part two to this)

a change of heart and a silver lining down on camelia street - grace facciola x quinn hughes

we were supposed to be just friends - jordyn wong x luke hughes

this scene feels like what i once saw on a screen - kaye suzuki x matthew tkachuk

hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you - clementine sandoval x nico hischier (part of the blue universe)

i'd give anything to stop time and drive around anaheim at sundown - isabelle holloway x trevor zegras (part two to this)

i guess i was running from something - clementine sandoval x nico hischier (part of the blue universe)

i'm not worried about where you are, or who you will go home to - mitch marner x gn reader

you're the risk, i'm gonna take it - brock boeser x penelope kaufman

write me into your thoughts - jack hughes x amelie fishel (part of the reckless driving universe)

in paris, you asked me if I was afraid that we'd fall out of love - cole caufield x emily harcourt

wrap your arms around me, baby boy - john marino x danielle layden

[lovelyloveday]

A rock and roll thriller drenched in love, humanity, and the ferocious power of female friendships. Once More from the Top by Emily Layden   https://bit.ly/4erYYq2  

[musingsofabookworm1]

All Girls by Emily Layden

[readitwriteit]

Book Review: All Girls by Emily Layden

10/10. An excellent commentary on sex and consent from the perspective of straight and queer high school girls. Discussions of sexual assault and rape were enlightening, even though the characters are sometimes hard to keep straight. It was deep, but a little funny.

[morepeachyogurt]

all girls; emily layden

[rank-sentimentalist]

Emily Layden, All Girls

Set in Atwater, a fictional all-girls boarding school in Connecticut.

One (small) plot point in the novel: a Never Have I Ever game in which a character admits to having a Tumblr.

"Wait a minute," [Character] says, "this isn't like a past tense thing, like you had a Tumblr? You have a Tumblr? You didn't delete it?"

A good read overall. Worth checking out.

[violettesbooks]

[almoststardust]

Instead Mia looks skyward again. "You know, the truth is, I don't hate it here." "Me neither," Bryce agrees. "It's got work to do," Mia murmurs, like an afterthought. "But it's not all bad. "I know," Bryce whispers. And she does. Later that night, tucked into her bed at four in the morning, Lauren sound asleep in the bed across from hers, Bryce will think about this, the sentimental denouement at the end of an adrenaline-fueled night. She'll put it next to how Mia went quiet in the tunnels, her steely determination every step of the way. She'd never imagined that Mia Tavoletti might love Atwater as much as her mother does, as much as her grandmother. But now she understands. Now she will want to say to her mother: This is what it is to love a place. She'll want to tell her: You have to want it to be better.

Emily Layden, All Girls

[librospdfgratismundoepub]

Las buenas chicas - Emily Layden (2021)

AL PRINCIPIO AMAS EL LUGAR AL QUE PERTENECES. LUEGO MADURAS. «Retrata de manera sublime la vida en un internado de Nueva Inglaterra.» The New York Times «Una novela perfecta para los lectores de Sally Rooney y Curtis Sittenfeld.» Sant Martin´s Press Atwater es un exclusivo internado femenino de Nueva Inglaterra, cuna de intelectuales feministas y de pensamiento moderno. Sus alumnas son…

[bigtickhk]

All Girls by Emily Layden https://amzn.to/37KHV2G

https://bookshop.org/a/17891/9781250270894

[poisonpicked]

tag drop 4/??? 

emily, ethan, finn 

[chthonic-cassandra]

Recent books, fiction -

K-Ming Chang, Bestiary - a coming-of-age story about a Taiwanese-American girl contending with legacies of intergenerational trauma within a web of Taiwanese folklore. I wanted to love this but ultimately didn't - I found it extremely overwritten, not controlled or deliberate enough in its structure or use of imagery, and far too enamored with its own engagement with the grotesque. There was a lot that was interesting here, but I found it unfortunately nearly unreadable. It seems to be part of a definite trend I've noticed of new novels by authors with a knack for vivid and memorable imagery but who seem to string those images together one upon another rather than giving any attention to sentence-by-sentence construction of prose. I think most of you reading this can probably recognize the style I'm trying to describe here; it's getting increasingly common in contemporary fiction, and I have noticed my own tolerance for it waning significantly. This has been frustrating.

Hannah Chapin, Foul is Fair - YA Macbeth as a rape-revenge story. Very very bad on every level. Skip this.

Kristen Arnett, With Teeth - claustrophobic study of parenthood and unreliable pov characters, following Sammie, a lesbian mother struggling to parent her son and maintain her relationship with her wife over the course of a decade in her life. This was tight and enthralling, but a deeply unpleasant reading experience; Sammie's inability to see the people close to her as full people made me chafe to get out of living inside her head, but it held my attention all the way through. Kept coming to the edges of saying something sharper about parents' denial of their own capacity for violence, but didn't quite go there. I'll be thinking about this for a while, but not sure how much I actually liked it.

Allison Saft, Down Comes the Night - YA fantasy; a disgraced healer gets involved in sinister political magicians to make it up to her aunt, the queen. Solid but unexceptional YA fantasy, enlivened by some gothic tropes it never fully committed to.

Emily Layden, All Girls - panoramic study of the impact of a sexual assault scandal in a girls boarding school. This should have been trite, but was in fact sharply observed, insightful and unsentimental about teenage girlhood. The world of fancy boarding schools is quite foreign to me (though the milieu inhabited by the pre-professional dancer character was not, and Layden draws that with unerring accuracy), but Layden brings that world to life vividly. Likewise, the structural device of writing each chapter from the point of view of a different student could have become irritating but somehow never did. I was pleasantly surprised by this.

Catriona Silvey, Meet Me In Another Life - time loop novel about two people who keep finding each other in different versions of reality. At times touching, but didn't quite land for me; I found something about its focus on questions about determinism versus free will a bit alienating.

Kiersten White, Slayer - I keep reading White's books hoping to enjoy them as much I as I did her girl!Vlad Tepes trilogy, but I haven't yet. This one is published (official? canonized?) Buffy fan fiction, about two sisters born into a family of Watchers after the events of the tv series. It was fine, but didn't draw me in, and I know my lack of familiarity with Buffy canon outside of the show itself put me at a disadvantage.

Sophie Macintosh, The Water Cure - three girls raised in seclusion by parents who taught them to engage in painful and humiliating rituals have to make sense of the world after their father's death. I am always interested in these kinds of narratives and there were parts of what Macintosh was doing that I found moving and elegant, but I didn't find this psychologically plausible. It treads an uncomfortable line between hazy allegory and psychological realism, and I don't think it succeeds. I think Dogtooth did this a lot better.

[bookaddict24-7]

New Young Adult Releases Coming Out Today! (February 16th, 2021)

___

Have I missed any new Young Adult releases? Have you added any of these books to your TBR? Let me know! ___

New Standalones/First in a Series:

Amelia Unabridged by Ashley Schumacher

Of Silver & Shadow by Jennifer Gruenke 

The Wide Starlight by Nicole Lesperance

We Are the Fire by Sam Taylor

A Shot at Normal by Marisa Reichardt

All Girls by Emily Layden

New Sequels: 

Reaper of Souls (Kingdom of Souls #2) by Rena Barron

Blood Sworn (Ashlords #2) by Scott Reintgen

A Court of Silver Flames (A Court of Thorns and Roses #4) by Sarah J. Maas 

Renegade Flight (Rebelwing #2) by Andrea Tang 

___

Happy reading!

[heatwa-ves]

was tagged by @rayvven thank you!

last song: currently listening to karate by babymetal 😝

last movie: uhhh probably the given movie last week if that counts

book im reading: all girls by emily layden, i like it a lot so far!

@deepeststrawberrymoon @shipsarebeautiful @hi-im-otter if you want!

[dykefever]

get to know me questions!

tagged by the lovely @heart-axe <3

last song: paul by big thief

last show: the bear (i think?)(the only valid one at least x)

currently reading: my brothers book!! also all girls by emily layden

currently watching: a league of their own (i was watching it when i spilled water on my laptop :-( i’m halfway through ep two xx) (genuinely incredible show abt queer women though like…oh shit)

latest obsession: umm probably hash browns x delicious stuff xx had them most days for breakfast the last week x

tagging the polycule of course xx @gaewaren @emerqldv @steelycunt