Daily Archives: October 18, 2024

Victoria Monét Announces ‘Everywhere You Are’ Children’s Book Release Helping Children Cope With Separation Anxiety

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Grammy Award-winning artist and songwriter Victoria Monét is set to debut her first children’s book, Everywhere You Are, next summer with Penguin Young Readers. Read more about the book, its illustrator and when it’s set to be released inside.

Published by Putnam Books for Young Readers, Everywhere You Are, is a lyrical and heartwarming story aimed to comfort children experiencing separation anxiety while offering solace to hardworking parents. The book will be available in both English and Spanish editions, ensuring its reach to a broader audience.

The story, beautifully illustrated by Alea Marley, follows a moon comforting a young star as they part ways at dawn, symbolizing the connection between parents and their children even when they’re not physically present. Inspired by Monét’s own experiences as a working parent, Everywhere You Are serves as a touching reminder of the enduring love between parent and child.
“This book means so much to me,” Monét shared in a statement. “It brings so much joy to know that families will share moments of reflection, understanding and quality time while reading this book for generations to come! I’m passionate about the subject of the book and explaining it in a way that is digestible for a child.”
The acclaimed singer and songwriter expressed her love for writing in all forms, sharing a special excitement about creating a work that can spark meaningful moments for families.
“I can’t wait to share it,” Victoria added.
Monét, who has been celebrated for her talents in songwriting and performing, including her breakthrough album Jaguar II, continues to push boundaries in her career. Her ability to connect with audiences through music is sure to translate seamlessly into her literary debut, as she explores themes of love, separation, and comfort in a way that resonates with children and parents alike.
Victoria’s exceptional career has already made her a household name in the music industry, and with this foray into children’s literature, she adds another dimension to her creative pursuits. Her unique perspective as both an artist and a mother brings authenticity to Everywhere You Are, making it a book that promises to be cherished by families for generations.
Be sure to look out for the children’s book on June 24, 2025.

Victoria Monét Announces ‘Everywhere You Are’ Children’s Book Release Helping Children Cope With Separation Anxiety 
was originally published on
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JD Vance demanded $40,000 and first-class flights during speaking tour for hit book, report says

Your support helps us to tell the storyThis election is still a dead heat, according to most polls. In a fight with such wafer-thin margins, we need reporters on the ground talking to the people Trump and Harris are courting. Your support allows us to keep sending journalists to the story.The Independent is trusted by 27 million Americans from across the entire political spectrum every month. Unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock you out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. But quality journalism must still be paid for.Help us keep bring these critical stories to light. Your support makes all the difference.CloseRead moreCloseJD Vance demanded $40,000 and first-class flights while promoting his Hillbilly Elegy book in 2017, years before he entered politics, according to a report.Vance made the lavish request for an appearance at a Midwestern public university four years before he was elected to the Senate, records obtained by POLITICO show.But the University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to the outlet, eventually bowed out of negotiations with Vance because they were “too much to overcome.”According to the outlet, in February 2017, a representative from the university contacted Vance’s publisher, HarperCollins, enquiring about an appearance from the author as his book had been shortlisted as a finalist for its 2017 – 2018 Go Big Read.The publisher informed the college that a 45-minute appearance, including a question-and-answer session and book signing, would cost $25,000 plus first-class flights, hotel, meals, and travel on the ground, according to POLITICO.Vance’s book was confirmed as the winner and when the university informed the publisher, they reportedly told them his speaking fee had gone up to $40,000. The university managed to negotiate the fee back down to $30,000, but talks reportedly came to a halt over difficulty pinning down a date.JD Vance at a campaign event in Greensboro, North Carolina on October 10. Vance allegedly made a lavish request for an appearance at a Midwestern public university four years before he was elected to the Senate

Meet the reader inspired to seek their own eclectic, confused and misdirected adventures with books

Cramming half-heartedly for the Scholarship, I looked up from the red-jacketed Williamson’s History of the British Empire, towards the barrack’s plumed, imperial hillsides where canon-bursts of bamboo sprayed the ridge, riding to Khartoum, Rorke’s Drift, through dervishes of dust, behind the chevroned jalousies I butchered fellaheen, thuggees, Mamelukes, wogs— Derek Walcott, ‘Another Life’, quoted in Abdulrazak Gurnah, ‘Learning to Read’
The imagination of the modern high school or college classroom across the historical stretch of the British Empire is incomplete without a certain student right at the back of the lecture hall. They are perpetually distracted, immersed in their own unruly imagination; they shirk homework and fail at examinations. But they are scandalous in a special way. Their failure is both a rebellion and a creation, a glazed indifference to an instrumental system of education whose colonial character – often long past decolonisation – is hinted rather than directly established. Rabindranath Tagore’s short story, “Tota Kahini”, translated as “The Bird’s Tale”, is iconic in this indictment. In this allegorical story, a bird is captured by the order of the king. Infuriated by its wild and unrestrained singing, the king hands the bird over to pundits who train it day and night, drowning it in tables and grammar, till the bird eventually becomes a lifeless body, silent at last, brought to the king, who squeezes its corpse stuffed with paper and nods with satisfaction at the death of its wild song.Rabindranath’s legendary impatience with institutionalised education of the kind he saw in existence ranged from his own shirking of school as a boy to his establishment of Visva-Bharati as a university of alternative education. The vastness of his critique of traditional education is not my subject here. I wish rather to return to the figure of that scandalous student who variously articulates failure, frustration, and disappointment in their institutional experience of colonially derived curricular education that has, for instance, taken on a particularly pervasive form in India, all the way to our postcolonial present.Recalling his education at the University of Calcutta sometime in the second decade of the 20th century, the Bengali memoirist and essayist Nirad C Chaudhuri had this to say about all but a few exceptions among his professors: “I paid no attention whatever to what they said and sat on one of the back-benches, either reading a book of my choice, or scribbling, or thinking my own thoughts.” Shirking lectures, loafing off in the back benches, he however turned to another institution, the library, to which he credits “nearly all my higher education”.Nearly forty years later, writing about his undergraduate education at the University of Allahabad in 1964, the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra recalls the pettily strategic character of his curricular study, comprising subjects that were “scoring”, the frenzy of note-taking and rote-learning, and efforts to game the examination system by guessing possible questions from test-papers of previous years and decades – all the while privately growing as a poet and a thinker entirely outside this institutional space. And another twenty years later, remembering his newly minted college degree from 1988, also at the University of Allahabad, Pankaj Mishra describes it as “three idle bookish years at a provincial university in a decaying old provincial town” that had left him with stodgy but patchy learning in a dated colonial fashion but ironically with the desire to fill these large lacunae as hungrily as possible.Debates around western education in the British colonies are now vast enough to make up their own subfield. I return to some of its key contours later in this book. But long before I became familiar with these ceaselessly evolving debates, and long past my own stumbling familiarity with them, I cannot overcome my own memory of the slow, tedious violence of the apparatus of test papers and note-taking and cheat sheets that were our sole weapons to deal with the giant demon of examinations that tested how well we knew the periodic tables of literary history and style taxonomies of authors – even in the last years of the previous century. But why did we feel this violence? And what was this strange force behind the urge to defy it? Perhaps it was the anxiety of being irresponsible young people in a developing nation where the responsible chose careers in medicine and engineering. Perhaps it was urgency for a kind of cosmopolitanism only attainable from books in the pre-digital age; perhaps a kind of bohemeana that only eclectic reading could read and support.In the end, it was not something purely definable by any of these forces, significant as they all were. But my dream in this book has been to show that a certain kind of reader was inspired to seek their own eclectic, often confused and misdirected adventures with books – particularly books from the metropolitan west that were divorced from their own immediate reality. Perversely, their inspiration was powered by frustration with patterns of the strategic instrumentalism, sometimes of an exclusionary kind, that western humanistic education came to constitute in the colony and the postcolony.The reasons behind them vary according to history and geography, and yet certain unifying patterns are discernible across the stretch of the historical British Empire (which occasionally overlapped with other forms of domination). The ironic centrality of British colonial education to the making of these adventurous autodidacts makes the English language my natural and primary archive, but this is in no way to suggest that that was the only language in which these figures conducted their reading lives. While Nirad C Chaudhuri read and wrote just as much in Bengali as in English, Toru Dutt’s connection with French literature was possibly deeper than her connection with English, along with the reading she did in Bengali and rudimentary Sanskrit. Peter Abrahams memorably chronicles his rich and troubling relation with Afrikaans literature as trapped between a beloved teacher and a history of racist nationalism, and Sindiwe Magona recollects early tremors of movement between Xhosa and English, and describes her later classroom challenges while teaching Afrikaans. The unique history of the Black and Brown diaspora in the Caribbean has left most writers there only with European languages and their creolised variations, and for the figures I read from that part of the world, English accounts for their primary reading and writing lives.Historically, however, the global identity of the British Empire has been richly multilingual and deeply polyphonic. My focus on English in this book is, to a great extent, a gesture of offering unity to a large cultural and territorial expanse through my own scholarly expertise on world English. But the logic and reality of British colonial education in the humanities and the future writing lives of these figures also point to English as the natural archive of this study.Most people would agree that autodidactism is vital to any form of aesthetic education, even when institutions and systems are fulfilling to students. Recent trends in critique and post critique have also established the amateur reader to be more central to criticism than it might have been assumed in the decades of high professionalisation of literary study in the twentieth century. But there is a unique urgency and aspiration in the amateur self-making of the literary subject in a structure of peripheral colonial education, distant from the imperial metropolis of power and culture that claims special attention. No doubt that my own memory of this desolate aspiration is one of the contexts of my interest in this process. But this small personal inspiration aside, my journey through the memorable accounts of reading and self-making left by a group of exceptional thinkers across the stretch of the British Empire across three continents has revealed to me the enabling idiosyncrasies of aesthetic education when self-willed in isolation, amidst conditions far from ideal for it.Excerpted with permission from The Amateur: Self-making and the Humanities in the Postcolony, Saikat Majumdar, Bloomsbury.