I Want to Burn This Place Down: Essays

by Maris Kreizman

I didn’t really have to reckon with the book publishing world’s complicity in spreading hate and lies at the time. Even though I was battling printers during the day and eating bar nuts for dinner, I was still lucky, so lucky that the content of hateful books produced by the industry in which I was complicit didn’t directly impact my life. So it was easy to keep focus on the daily drudgery and not big-picture concerns. Then Trump was elected. Then children were separated from their families at the southern border. Then over a million Americans died in a global pandemic, then Roe v. Wade was overturned, then there was a massive uptick in books being banned in school libraries. I watched the dehumanization of trans people become a right-wing talking point that was then often validated by centrist Democrats. Every single day I would scroll through Twitter and find some new devastating consequence to, among other things, publishers’ role in elevating bigots.