“Perhaps the best way to appreciate Updike and discover what all the fuss was about is to start with the early stories and novels and carve out your own canon at a stately pace, as his lordship would desire.

“The as-yet-unspoken words will be found in this place where the language falters, on the frontier of psyche and soma.”

“when suddenly I became hot, flushed all over, with the understanding that these people loved me. Perhaps I had never before been open enough to feel it, but in that moment I did: how fragile a person was in loving you, and the terrible responsibility that came with it.

“Can anyone say confidently that he will not succeed when he tries once again to jail his political opponents for speaking out against him, as he seems so intent upon doing?” @sbg1.bsky.social

Hear @paranoiacs.bsky.social's cover of Lucinda Williams' "Passionate Kisses" (and a bunch of other tracks from their new album out this week)

“It is a sign of a fatally limited imagination to assume that we can only ever desire the pittance to which we are currently reconciled.”—Becca Rothfeld

“That’s the way it is for women. Our whole lives are one great Catch 22, in which the more we stand up against those who abuse us, and the structures that make such abuse possible, the more we are portrayed as having deserved it.”

“The best are strong enough that it’s as if she carved them, with a knife, onto a library desk.” @dwightgarner.bsky.social

“No one was who they meant to be, not yet, anyway.”—Jill Lepore

“I told myself that if I were a maker of perfumes I would make one and call it Spring, and it would smell like this cool, sweet early-morning air and I would let only beautiful young brown girls use it . . .”—Ann Petry

“what more will it take for us to finally acknowledge that, when he says this stuff, he actually means to follow through with it?” @sbg1.bsky.social

Ruth Marcus, in The New Yorker Daily, speaking with Caroline Mimbs Nyce, the newsletter editor: “We weren’t just a newspaper—we were a community. And we did what we did not because people were paying us to do it but because we love doing it.

From @ruthmarcus.bsky.social: “The author David Maraniss was with the Post for forty-eight years. He resigned as an associate editor in 2024, after Bezos killed the editorial page’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris.

How I love this story! Turns out, it was just what I needed. “The moment I saw Sarah, I knew that she was dying. She was sitting slumped over in a wheelchair. In the two years since I had seen her, she had become a gaunt old woman with terrible bruised shadows under her eyes . . .”—Ann Petry

Bezos has killed the Washington Post's books pages. John Williams is a mensch, and a good and loyal friend, to me, to @backlisted.bsky.social and to anyone who loves literature and reading. Now more than ever, you know where not to buy your books, or anything else for that matter.

Just a note to say how grateful we are for all the work of the Washington Post foreign staff bringing ground truth about the world to a hometown that desperately needs it. -30-

"We’re witnessing a murder," writes @ashleyrparker.bsky.social. "Jeff Bezos ... and Will Lewis, the publisher he appointed at the end of 2023, are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special." www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

My wonderful colleague Nora Krug writes beautifully about her brief but intense correspondence with DFW in 1996. (Gift link.) wapo.st/4bvcviA

‘the Beatitudes are harder.’

“Steeped in echo and reverb described as ‘swampy’ by critics, Reed’s performances were never flashy or rushed but instead seduced listeners with their churning grooves and down-home charm.”—Bill Friskics-Warren

“with a face like a fist and a voice of sheet metal.”

“I realized that the most telling data point about how the Trump White House is handling the political furor over Minnesota is hiding in plain sight—on Stephen Miller’s incendiary, mendacious, terrifying feed.” @sbg1.bsky.social

“Winnicott insisted that love, imperfectly given, was enough to get a child started. What he could not promise was that it would suffice to keep disaster at bay, because it can’t.”—Rebecca Mead

“Lively’s prose is sharp, precise, perfectly pitched, but shrinks from flashiness . . .”—Charles McGrath

“The coincidence of two books on the subject of mattering being published at the same time is clearly a reflection of something larger. There is a lack, or a void, that has been ascendant in the last several years . . .” @jenszalai.bsky.social

“Before the ailments and the annihilations, they had fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers; good days as well as bad ones.

“It’s a hot-water bottle in print form. It’s going to be an enormous best seller for depressing reasons.” @dwightgarner.bsky.social

“When the idea for ‘The Quiet House’ occurred to me, I was keen to write about how, as you grow older, you attain this long view. Less submerged in becoming, you begin to make out more clearly the forms and shapes of your past experiences.”

“How many polite ways, after all, are there to ask whether the President of the United States has lost his mind?” @sbg1.bsky.social

“I was told to cross over with a group of schoolkids. I was given a little apron like they were wearing, over short pants—I was rather small for my age. I still remember crossing the bridge—there were guards and soldiers—and feeling my legs turning to cotton.”

“‘Departure(s)’ brims with wisdom reluctantly acquired.” @dwightgarner.bsky.social

“‘Now, just wait a second, sonny,’ he said. ‘Just wait a second. I want to get a rise out of this chap.’ “‘Goodbye, Daddy,’ I said, and I went down the stairs and got my train, and that was the last time I saw my father.”

“Trump’s approach to the world is . . . a narcissistic form of unilateralism that says, loudly, I can do whatever I want, whenever and however I want to do it.” @sbg1.bsky.social

“I was scared to death I would be sent to jail. I was being driven around by two guys in a pink, radically tail-finned Plymouth.

“Words take a lot of their semantic coloration from the words around them.”—Louis Menand

“the pages turn themselves.” @dwightgarner.bsky.social

“His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence.

On October 26th, 1952, in her studio on West Twenty-third Street, Helen Frankenthaler painted “Mountains and Sea.” It was a turning point for her career and for art history both. newyorkermag.visitlink.me/k385RI

Happy New Year! We love sharing these pro-book posters from the Works Projects Administration Poster Collection in the Library's Prints and Photographs Division. Of the 2,000 WPA posters known to exist, the Library of Congress's collection of more than 900 is the largest.

#BOTD in 1933: Charles Portis. Here's the final paragraph from an early draft of TRUE GRIT. (His papers are in the Wittliff Collections at Texas State U.) He's still working out the final lines but what strikes me is how much of this draft resembles the final book. A master from the start.

“Use the best cornmeal for your crust . . .” @dwightgarner.bsky.social writes in paraphrase of Betty Fussell. I like that, paraphrased or direct, or both. Does not matter to me, at this stage. I also like Betty Fussell (and Paul) very much.

“He might open for Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden one night, and then take the stage in a tiny music hall in the Jersey suburbs the next. “He loved it all . . .” @risenc.bsky.social

“The difference between the political climate in the U.K. and in the U.S. these days feels like the difference between depression and psychosis. I’m opting for depression.”—Rebecca Mead

“a Soglow was a drawing without a single detail that could be called extraneous, without any embellishment, without a line that did not seem essential or inevitable. There was nothing to distract the eye or the mind.”—William Shawn

‘There were tissues. But there was also resilience.’

Not today but soon it will be time to read about Charlie. He will “put on a striped vest with brass buttons,” to go on duty operating an elevator.

“Why am I always so willing to accept the worst idea of myself, even when it’s put forth by strangers?”

Thank God, for Alva Johnston (John McPhee’s great influence): “Einstein knew things that everybody else was ignorant of, and was ignorant of things that everybody else knew.

“I had Liebling’s and Sontag’s warring voices in my mind. Putting it down, after completing its nearly 700 pages, I was surprised to find myself, a committed Liebling fanatic, on the Sontag side of the divide.”