The violence of either grief or joy Their own enactures with themselves destroy.

A horrifying vision of the future

'retreat and steps back are not the same' Ross Scott-Buccleuch's Harm Dissuasive, taken from the fragmentary and yet playful collection Fang Coda, via @salopress.bsky.social

GBP SHORT STORY PRIZE: A quick announcement and apologies - we'll be posting the GBP Short Story Prize longlist at 17:00 tonight; it would have been much earlier but alas, an IT meltdown has scuppered that... (Working on it now!) (Please share if you can.)

An Absence of Sea by Christina Tudor-Sideri | *out 16 April* www.erratumpress.com/an-absence-o...

Some of Infinite Jest's almost-proverbs from the first of its great, deeply human Alcoholics Anonymous/Ennet House/recovery sections. A selection of my favourites, very particularly the last two

Three new acquisitions from a recent Cambridge trip: Our Wives Under the Sea - Julia Armfield Jean - Madeleine Dunnigan (a @dauntbookspub.bsky.social original) The Turn of the Screw - Henry James

'[...] and in the confusing night he forgot for the while what experience had taught him—that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.' ~ Graham Greene - The Heart of the Matter

For our winter issue, Granta goes to therapy. Read the issue for free online for the next five days. granta.com/products/gra...

My February big read, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest - evoking in my mind, 200pgs in, the chaos, the hilarity of William Gaddis's J.R., the drug-life and -world of Christiane F., and Pale Fire's voluminous footnotes

On loan from a friend, a more recent Ishiguro: The Buried Giant

'The heart without an owner.'

'[...] I was born in the night of January the second and third In the unreliable year Of eighteen-ninety something or other, And the centuries surround me with fire.' ~ Osip Mandelstam - Aortas Fill with Blood, tr. James Greene

‘And then she moved him. Just when doubt, regret and every single unasked question was packed away, long after he believed he had willed himself into being, at the very time and place he wanted to take root—she moved him. From room to room. Like rag doll.’ P. 261 ♾️ 👥🫂♾️

“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.” —— Virginia Woolf, The Waves #SundaySentence #BOTD #HBD

'[...] and that on hot summer evenings I used to sit and watch the swallows, always in pairs, and wish sentimentally that I too could be a pair with somebody.' ~ Nancy Mitford - The Pursuit of Love

“The eternity which Proust opens to view is convoluted time, not boundless time. His true interest is in the passage of time in its most real—that is, space-bound—form, and this passage nowhere holds sway more openly than in remembrance within and aging without.” — Benjamin, “The Image of Proust”

'Correct understanding of a matter and misunderstanding of the same matter do not exclude each other entirely.' ~ Franz Kafka - The Trial, tr. Idris Parry

'Often - and in my inmost self perhaps all the time - I doubt whether I am a human being.' ~ Franz Kafka in a letter to Felice Bauer (tr. Elias Canetti)

We have the post-Christmas blues* and are going to struggle to pay our bills at the end of the month. If you would like to help, why not buy a surprise book parcel for just £10 inc P&P, 2 wrapped novels in the post [*not personally, I'm v happy! Just poor] www.treehousebookshop.co.uk/shop/details...

World Book Night 2026 – The Mountains Are Calling… You're invited to respond to a poem, text or book about mountains for an exhibition and mail art swap. Deadline 3rd March 2026. Some examples below, one on left by @paulxhearn.bsky.social Download the info at: www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/news/#wbn2026

Now reading through with a friend (an enjoyably thought-provoking way of reading a classic): Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights 'Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves [...]'

Congratulations to Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi, Heart Lamp is shortlisted for the @bookcritics.bsky.social 2025 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize! ❤️‍🔥

The Brontë sisters' first effort, a compilation of their poetry published and advertised at their own expense, sold only two copies Undeterred, within two years they had published Jane Eyre (Charlotte), Wuthering Heights (Emily), and Agnes Grey (Anne) respectively, to lasting acclaim

'I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch?' ~ C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed. 'A record against total collapse' in his words, after the death of his wife

From the always wonderful Heffers bookshop in Cambridge, Alexandra Popoff's Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century A biography of the Soviet dissident writer of the immense Life and Fate, the tragically unfinished Everything Flows, on the scene reporting of Stalingrad, and so much more

After many months of inattention, I have at last achieved what at one time seemed impossible (updating my website)

Our three newest titles are now available for pre-order at salopress.com 🤩 As a tiny tiny independent publisher running this thing on limited funds, from our dining room, we are grateful for every single order. Thank you all for the support so far.

Three English novels from the 1940s: Graham Greene - The Heart of the Matter Nancy Mitford - The Pursuit of Love Nevil Shute - Landfall

New year, new project: The Miracle of Dunkirk, 1940

'She but brooded at first in her corner of the carriage: it was like burying her exposed face, a face too helplessly exposed, in the cool lap of the common indifference, of the dispeopled streets [...]' ~ Henry James, The Golden Bowl

Some more December acquisitions: Anne Brontë - The Tenant of Wildfell Hall John Steinbeck - The Long Valley Voltaire - Candide (tr. John Butt)

First read of the year, Traumnovelle by Grant Maierhofer, a vivid and imaginative recasting of the life and mind of Anatoli Bugorski, the physicist who looked into a malfunctioning particle accelerator and lived. Out now from the excellent @erratumpress.bsky.social

'She bent her head, overcome by a sense of unworthiness. I have taken the name of Virginia Woolf in vain, she thought.' ~ Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac

'[...] to put it more simply, in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.' ~ Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

'Her life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance, no more real than a television drama. Death, who now stood by her side, was as familiar to her as a family member, missing for a long time but now returned.' ~ Han Kang, The Vegetarian (tr. Deborah Smith)

ERRATUM special December offer 💥25% off TRAUMNOVELLE💥 via this link -> shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params... [US/UK customers only]

That was when it was sad, when you lay awake at night and remembered things.

'[...] that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid.' ~ George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

Svetlana Alexievich (SECOND-HAND TIME, tr. Bela Sheyavich) will be on the BBC World Service today, 12.05 GMT: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w...

'[...] and who from her solitary situation was ready to like anyone [...]' ~ Jane Austen, Catharine, or The Bower

'My advice is: 'Go outside, to the country, enjoy the sun and all nature has to offer. Go outside and try to recapture the happiness within yourself; think of all the beauty in yourself and in everything around you and be happy.'' ~ Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, tr. Susan Massotty

'[...] the foam of past sorrows folds into itself like a flat mirror.' Very excited to receive (amid other goodies) Telenovela by Gonzalo C. Garcia, the latest from @galleybeggars.bsky.social - available now to order!

'Then I fired four more times into the lifeless body, where the bullets sank without leaving a trace. And it was as if I had rapped sharply, four times, on the fatal door of destiny.' The Outsider - Albert Camus, tr. Sandra Smith

New acquisitions: The Vegetarian - Han Kang, tr. Deborah Smith The Outsider - Albert Camus, tr. Sandra Smith Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner

SAVE SCRIPT HAVEN! Please donate/share our crowdfunder to keep this vital independent bookshop in Worcester open!!! ❤️ Save Script Haven crowdfunder: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/save-scrip...

A gift from my mother: The Book of Saints, compiled by the Benedictine monks of St Augustine's Abbey, Ramsgate

Thrilled to receive these delightful editions from @renardpress.com's impressive Classic Fiction selection: Three Lives - Gertrude Stein It Can't Happen Here - Sinclair Lewis Venus and Adonis - William Shakespeare Catharine of the Bower - Jane Austen

'Only yesterday, in love —' ~ Parting, from Anna Akhmatova's Selected Poems, tr. Richard McKane