I finished this today! What a treat. Need to find a way to finagle this into some kind of blurb, but feel like fans of Sam Lipsyte, and Mike Nagel, and Richard Linklater('s hangout movies, especially) will especially love this!

A small win: I’ve been asking students to come up with chapter titles and it’s been a quick way to demonstrate comprehension, identify theme, open discussion, and have a little fun.

Bully boosters!

hot

Update

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

Let’s sell some books!

justreadingnook.com/2026/03/30/l... Grateful for this new review of Terrestrial from Hugh Blanton which incorporates some details about the Phoenix Lights.

being able to sit patiently with other people's thoughts, sit patiently with your own, and make both of those processes legible to someone who is not you is very valuable. if you can find a new way to do this that is fantastic news but I suspect it will at least resemble the model we've inherited

You've been "sold a story" about the science of reading. cc: #literacies

New post: What happens when teachers are cut off from the discipline they teach? How is HS English becoming codified, commodified, & captured by corporate interests and administrative functionaries? Where do we go from here? #edusky #literacies #academicsky open.substack.com/pub/trevoral...

Hey friends, Submarines is a blast and you need it in your life.

About to watch v for vendetta before it leaves hbo and it’s wild to see a preview for the Harry Potter show.

lazy morning here and I sat on my couch and read the first half of this, and what a treat. best, fave, most fun "hang out" novel I've read in a while. treat yourself and preorder this rn!

No one has bought my book from @asterismbooks.bsky.social this month. There's still time for you to be the one. asterismbooks.com/product/stil...

Bookstore signing today. Someone came in to ask me questions about the book and told me it’s one of her favorite books. There are moments in this whole thing where it feels especially worth it.

About to see Project Hail Mary!

I long for the "painting in your pocket" days but I think these are pretty banger, ngl

Boy, Justice League has some great dialogue, like when Wonder Woman asks a reactionary terrorist who he is and says her lasso compels him to tell the truth and he says “We are a small group of reactionary terrorists.” 🫡

"Human teachers...had disagreed with the things the State had wanted them to teach. Sometimes they had wanted their students to read books." www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

Private equity has been fantasizing about the capture of education for decades. This is the deepest they’ve ever gotten their tendrils into it.

I’ve been wanting to have students team teach poems and haven’t had time to work out the details and today I thought, what if we do a weeklong poetry symposium as an end of year project. Maybe I won’t get it off the ground but maybe I will?

Both the Wall Street Journal and The Information confirming that OpenAI is killing Sora - both the app and *access to its video-generating model for developers*. This is a huge move that suggests things are a bit desperate www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open... www.theinformation.com/articles/ope...

Y’all can react how you want, but I’m going to take joy in every win against tech oligarchs, no matter how small it seems.

My dream for a while was to go to grad school at Columbia. I made a lot of mistakes that ultimately, after many turns, took me to City College instead, and I am forever grateful.

Kill Radio and a lot of other fantastic Malarkey titles are still available here for $13. Just sayin'

Post: ● The pros of teaching without powerpoint If teaching is transmission, the presentation is a vital tool. If, we see it as conversing to coordinate the meaning of content, then PowerPoint sits in the way of interaction between teachers and students. christianmooreanderson.com/pros-of-teac...

Pick up @spencerfleury.bsky.social collection from @malarkeybooks.bsky.social

this is also my favorite review

Picked up a couple Brother electric typewriters, one for home, one for the classroom, and I think this was the peak of technology.

I asked my sophomores to do a word lens, writing 200 to 300 words about what work one particular word in The Book Thief is doing and now I have about 20,000 words of micro essays to read and am genuinely excited to see what they have to say.

Wow I’ve never been more excited to do my taxes.

Moved this year and am just now unpacking boxes and found this treasure, still in its shipping envelope. It must have arrived the day before I moved. So fun to get it now, like a belated birthday present. @renbolger.bsky.social @malarkeybooks.bsky.social

The reason I want students to have to struggle with difficult texts is because I want them to have the capacity to make meaning in and of the world on their own.

I love when young people hate AI.

Exactly the kind of excerpt-driven, context-less, reading for "literary features" that is increasingly being forced upon high school English students and their teachers!

I like this quick and pithy infographic for students. (Higher-quality version here: www.jessicacalarco.com/teaching-res...)

crucial coverage from The Guardian that features our collaborative, movement-building website against-a-i.com

Happy One Weekaversary baby book

Lmao--having gone to Reed College, one of the only schools that requires Humanities 110 of all students, including works by Heraclitus and Aristotle and the Bible, I can testify that a return to the classics will not have the cultural effect that these middling conservative minds think it will.

I did what everybody else is doing and wrote about AWP, but specifically about friends and gratitude open.substack.com/pub/olddream...

At the Malarkey table at #AWP, I was describing Sheldon’s book as Canadian working-class surrealism, which is almost but not quite right. Think you can do better? Buy a copy and read it!

If you order a copy of Hair Shirt, poems by @yoadrianididit.bsky.social, we will include in your order a loose page from the unbound print proof. If you will the take that page and turn it into a blackout poem we would love to display it on our website. malarkeybooks.com/store/hairsh...

I don’t think I trust the same technology that tells teenagers to kill themselves and tells the military to bomb elementary schools with my students’ or my children’s’ education.

Find the writing that moves you. Type it up and print it out. Pin it to a cork board. Rip it from the cork board and feed it to your blender. Add turmeric. Add ginger. Press frappe. Swallow this abysmal mixture. Write your findings on the side of a tree. These are now your words.

The Luddite Renaissance is already upon us.

AWP Day 2!

@cowboyjamboree.bsky.social and @malarkeybooks.bsky.social reading tonight. I will be there. Maybe you? Maybe all of us will be there together?

Look at us, spreading Malarkey

everybody is buying The Walls Are Closing in on Us by @joshuatrentbrown.com and they are right to do so