“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” ~ Shirley Jackson

“Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.” ~ David Foster Wallace

"I saw the true nature of the ordered cosmos upon which I had based my hopes: its mutability and insubstantiality, as if it were merely a castle in the sand waiting helplessly and absurdly upon a deserted shore for the ravenous tide to flow in and devour it." ~ Matt Cardin

"Time flowed by like a black river that I watched from a stationary point on some undefined shore. I hovered above everything, clung to nothing, and regarded the world and its inhabitants as figments of a fleeting and pointless dream." ~ Matt Cardin

"The crack that runs through everything reaches across all time and space, travels jaggedly through all past and all potentiality. It is the slow fracture in the ice, the worm coring its way through the apple, coring the human heart. It is the following shadow." ~ Laird Barron

"Time is a ring. Everyone and everything gets squished under the wheel." ~ Laird Barron

"Enlightenment isn't necessarily a clean process. Enlightenment can be filthy, desperate, dangerous. Enlightenment is its own reward, its own punishment. You begin to see so much more. And so much more sees you." ~ Laird Barron

"Children are dying. That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world are hidden in those three words." ~ Steven Erickson

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

LIT LOUNGE ON 4 JULY

“From childhood’s hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe

"These bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us.” ~ Algernon Blackwood

“How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?” ~ Dostoevsky

“Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and The Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

“To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.” ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.” ~ Clive Barker

“Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.” ~ Steven Erikson

"There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it." ~ Steven Erikson

Reading event @ 8:00 pm on 17 April. Don’t miss it!

“Destiny has no beeper; Destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of ‘psst’ that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.” ~ David Foster Wallace

Excited for THIS! #PalestineBookAwards

ONLINE READINGS 17 APRIL @ 8PM

Some exciting news... I've been invited to Ireland for a writing residency by SWERVE (annual literary magazine / Lit Lounge / writing & art retreats). It will be the first time I've been a writer-in-residence. SWERVE is making great strides with its beautiful journal @swervejournal.bsky.social

“Enlightenment isn’t necessarily a clean process. Enlightenment can be filthy, desperate, dangerous. Enlightenment is its own reward, its own punishment. You begin to see so much more. And so much more sees you.” ~ Laird Barron

“There is no such sense of solitude as that which we experience upon the silent and vast elevations of great mountains.” ~ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

‘iIf you stop being a princess you become a kitchen maid. You can’t ever become a librarian or a tax collector.’ Colin Burrow on folk tales and the Brothers Grimm: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘When authoritarians promise a return to an imaginary past, they stoke a furious nostalgia in those who have no better way to understand what is actually undermining their sense of a durable and meaningful future.’ Judith Butler on Executive Order 14168: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘In Austen’s writing, humiliation can be shielded by comedy, and bruised feelings to some extent mollified, such that anger and grief can be transformed into a kind of sympathetic, knowing, female amusement.’ Freya Johnston on Jane Austen www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

DON’T MISS SHARON AND JUNE TOMORROW @ 8:00PM!!

‘At first sight, each of the three brothers is an exemplar of one particular way of thinking, and of living, and they are totally at odds. Who’s in the right?’ Daniel Soar on The Brothers Karamazov: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

“Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

From one of my favorite short stories: "He ran, trying to stumble faster and to deafen himself and his thoughts with his panting - for behind him in the dark he could hear a leisurely creaking which could be both the sound of limbs and, worse, a kind of laughter." ~ "Blacked Out" by Ramsey Campbell

SUBMISSIONS ARE OPEN

VISUAL ART SUBMISSIONS ARE OPEN!

T.E.D Klein describing a hole in the floor: “Beneath it, now exposed to view, lay a wide semicircular drainage hole that extended, from the look of it, hundreds of feet down to some place Coleridge might have dreamed of, where waters flowed in everlasting night.” ~ Children of The Kingdom

‘Merkel vehemently rejects the notion that the fundamental distinction in politics is between friend and foe.’ Christopher Clark on Angela Merkel’s memoir: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘The characters in these novels are deeply self-absorbed, their anxious ruminations accounting for much of the irony and pathos.’ Tim Park on the Canadian-Hungarian novelist David Szalay: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Our current bestsellers 💥⁣ lrb.me/6jh

The Poetry Society turns 116 today! 🎉

Calling all writers living in county #Limerick! Did you know you can receive free mentoring from an acclaimed writer of your choice? Thanks to the support of Limerick Arts Office. Applications close Sunday. irishwriterscentre.ie/opportunitie...

“The world is a strange place, thought Haupt, alone in the dark, almost unbearably so. And yet, it is the only place I have. And I'm not even entirely sure I have it.” ~ Brian Evenson

“Certainly solitude is dangerous for active minds. We require around us men who can think and talk. When we are alone for a long time, we people space with phantoms.” ~ The Horla, Guy de Maupassant

“So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You’d better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe.” ~ Isaac Asimov (Nightfall)