You know what to do!!!!!

let’s go people

Dec 1, the floodgates opened, 1105 words and a new, surging sense of possibility (I know it’ll get harder from here but still!) #acadecawriteathon

I’ve been reading and thinking about this new book for months, and have even written various talks and offshoot essays and such, but have been totally frozen as far as actually writing the book itself, until today, thanks to @annakornbluh.bsky.social and the #acadecawriteathon. A miracle!

It’s ok, I still love you, but a little feedback for the Bonne Maman higher ups: half the fun of advent calendars is finding the day!!

Love it!

If you’re pondering holiday gift ideas, you may be interested to know that my little book is 30% off! Though it strangely doesn’t seem to have made any Best Books of the Year lists (yet) it is small and cute and might bring some joy to someone in your life. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Sally Rooney fans take note — this cool new collection will be out in June! Includes an essay I wrote on Rooney and Cavell and queer remarriage plots. www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/bucknell/sal...

Wrote a little about Arundhati Roy’s Azadi kasiareads.com/2025/11/20/a...

🥰🥰🥰 (I also really enjoyed Intermezzo and think it’s probably her best book)

if you can’t see the aurora borealis tonight, here is a sewer tunnel which is a wonder in itself.

Wrote a little about Renee Gladman’s TOAF (and also about how good @joshthelibromancer.bsky.social newsletter is): kasiareads.com/2025/11/11/t...

“She is pursuing a masters in social work and looking into PhD programs in expressive arts therapy.” FASCINATING

Write a little about how Old in Art School helped me realize that I might NOT want to go to art school.

Phenomenal essay on what’s happening at UChicago.

Wrote a very little bit about Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story, which is just incredible. Mind-blowing novel. kasiareads.com/2025/11/04/m...

Great essay on Mamdani and anti-caste activism. It’s only in recent years that I’ve really started learning about this stuff, but the dawning awareness of the connections between the Trump world and Hindu nationalism is just terrifying.

Wrote a little about Maggie Millner’s Couplets kasiareads.com/2025/10/28/c...

The Friends of the Library Book Sale in Ithaca blesses us with its treasures twice a year. As it happens, in the Spring it usually falls on Mother’s Day and in the Fall it’s around my birthday, so I feel fully entitled to buy whatever I want.

Really fascinating essay, and deeply relevant to our own times. @tejnagaraja.bsky.social details different ways of thinking about war and labor and the misconceptions you can run into along the way. Agency, knowledge, intersectionality, types of labor, social perception. So many moving parts.

I will never forget when Black Messiah came out, like the actual minute it came out, my man and I lay in bed and listened to the entire thing start to finish while watching Twitter blow up with praise. It felt like such a collective moment. And the album was absolutely perfect, they all were.

Omg I got a starred review on @ala-booklist.bsky.social !!! www.booklistonline.com/products/981...

I’m not much of a podcast guy but I had SO much fun talking about @sinnersmovie.bsky.social on the @harryandjenpodcast.bsky.social and I think you can tell. It’s such a great movie and there’s so much to talk about! Spoilers abound so be sure to watch it first. open.spotify.com/episode/64Dm...

It’s @harvardbookstore.bsky.social Virtual Warehouse Sale day!

I was telling a friend in Portland that while I am very grateful if anyone buys my book, I am EXTRA grateful if they buy it from an indie bookstore! Firstly because I love supporting bookstores, and secondly because that’s likely the best shot I have for getting it onto store shelves…

A late summer dahlia from my garden #Flowers #Dahlias #MagentaMonday #MacroMonday #ColorADay #PinkMon #Bloomscrolling #BackyardBlooms #Anthophile #Photography #Edmonds

What a fucking G.

Only 3 more days to submit to the roundtable on Olga Tokarczuk's 18th Century that @kasiaiskasia.bsky.social and I are organizing for the 2026 ASECS. Your abstracts have to go through the ASECS portal, but please reach out to us individually if you're thinking of submitting & have any questions.

Wrote a little about Lisa Ko’s Memory Piece, which is a great story about female friendship and becoming an artist, and also an absolutely terrifying look at the dystopian future awaiting us. kasiareads.com/2025/09/17/m...

#18thc pals, pls RT: @kasiaiskasia.bsky.social & I are assembling a roundtable for the American Society for 18th-C Studies mting in Philly in April, on Olga Tokarczuk's 18th Century. Abstracts due 9/22. Pls help us think together about this fabulous novelist's wayward ways with our period & its 📚.

We didn't stop them, but we slowed them down. They got hundreds of us, but we kept them from getting hundreds more, and it wasn't violence or graffiti or insults that did the job, it was regular people getting involved. It was my neighbor the speech therapist, it was my friend the life-coach. 8/

Why? Well, for starters, 300 ICE agents have been moved to Chicago, leaving only about 300 in LA County which is about what we had before Trump took office. Why are they leaving? Because LA made their jobs TOO FUCKING HARD. LA Organized. LA sat on corners outside Home Depots with radios. 5/

Wrote a little about Danzy Senna’s Colored Television, which is a super interesting novel about artistic ambition and marriage kasiareads.com/2025/09/07/c...

Catch me promoting the @openletterbooks.bsky.social sale and some of my favorite #WiTMonth reads for @mid-theory.bsky.social!

Cramming in a few more #WiTMonth books — I wrote a little bit about A Singularity by Balsam Karam, tr. Saskia Vogel, pub. @feministpress.bsky.social I have been reflexively avoiding books lauded as “devastating” but I picked this up knowing nothing about it and it is really incredible.

“Chicago has long helped to keep alive tiny fields & esoteric areas of humanistic study... Without the univ’s support, & the continued training of grad students who can keep these bodies of kn going, entire spheres of human learning might eventually blink out.” www.theatlantic.com/culture/arch...

Camping with a bunch of friends and their kids. S: I hope no one gets hurt, I only brought one band-aid. T: Oh, I have several boxes. Me: I didn’t bring any band-aids. T, lovingly: nobody thought you did, Kasia. Me: I did bring tinned fish though! S: That tracks.

I wrote a little bit about Nan Da’s The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear, a complex and gripping read. kasiareads.com/2025/08/20/t...

A piece of good news!

A cool thing about copy-editors is that they can teach you that it’s HOME in, not HONE in

Another excellent #WiTMonth book (from @archipelagobooks.bsky.social) — wry, bristly, surprising. Scholastique Mukasonga is the rare author who lives up to the hype.

August is Women in Translation Month, aka #WITMonth and it’s something I really try to honor because I think it’s cool and important. So today I’m kicking things off with Years and Years by Hwang Jungeun, translated by Janet Hong, from @openletterbooks.bsky.social

Along with four other Jewish scholars of Jewish studies, I published an opinion piece in today’s Guardian about why we joined an amicus brief in Harvard’s case against the federal government. The article is here www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... #Palestine #Israel #Harvard #antisemitism

Making animated movies into live action: tiresome, unnecessary, lame Re-making every classic film into a muppet movie with a single human actor: sophisticated, erudite, revolutionary

A fab book that my Reading and Community class read an early draft of and loved!!!

I wrote a very short book about book clubs, a kind of memoir/essay, and it’s coming out in October! press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Opened my email just now to learn THE BARBARA JOHNSON COLLECTIVE received enthusiastic final board approval — it will officially be in the world soon(ish)!!!!!!! @nathankhensley.bsky.social is the best co-editor. Can’t wait for these brilliant, gorgeous, sometimes gutting essays to appear in print.

I know these lists are generally terrible (and always almost entirely anglophone) but this one is so bad that I have to share. (Full disclosure, I have only read 19 of them) www.latimes.com/entertainmen...

The winner of the 2024 Barrios Book in Translation Prize is Gwendolyn Harper’s translation from the Spanish of “A Last Supper of Queer Apostles” by Pedro Lemebel! #NBCCAwards @penguinbooksusa.bsky.social