i wrote myself about Scotland’s rich heritage of translating modernist big hitters last year: open.substack.com/pub/sigmapor...

Interesting short piece on the Scottish translators Willa and Edwin Muir, who popularised Kafka in the English-speaking world, and who I learnt about only recently, thanks to @balumcarnes.bsky.social.

check the size of this beast

found an interview with Laszlo Krasznahorkai where he describes encountering the Burryman

it’s not surprising that Olga Tokarczuk has played with AI given her work has always been engaged with the mystical dimensions of new technologies but more galling that she seems totally blind to the environmental devastation and the labour exploitation it’s founded upon.

fine, i’ll do the 100 novels thing. i haven’t repeated any authors and have started with the early gateway books that shaped me then the rest is a free for all.

i understand these lists are more helpful as provocations and this is by an English language publication but it’s nevertheless pretty miserable that of all 26 novels published after 1970 only four of them are non-anglophone and two of those are by the same author. www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

I'm Lead Judge of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, awarded at University of Edinburgh since 1919 and due to be announced this month. But the university is currently withholding 100% of my pay for participating in a marking and assessment boycott. So, at present, there will be no prize.

this is a week tonight!

utterly astonished to see an Edinburgh bookshop make a plea for volunteers to perform the same duties as their paid booksellers

some guy has asked me to leave the pub because he believes I’m CIA 😞

Looking forward to speaking to Nina Allan at Argonaut about the new biography about J.G. Ballard written with her late husband, Christopher Priest on May 7th.

when Pynchon writes ‘against the day’ on page 903 of Against the Day

hate it when you end up as an eunuch in the landscape of despair

publishers have really been producing some unhinged merch recently

i wrote up some reflections on Schattenfroh sigmaportfolio.substack.com/p/in-the-cha...

my book of the year has arrived

finally reunited with my now most valuable book

love this for Edinburgh

wearing this today for a real one

gutted to hear of the passing of Béla Tarr. in tribute, here’s the time we recreated the bar scene from Werckmeister Harmonies for my 30th birthday in 2019

reading thread, 2026 edition

Chalamet must be getting wary of typecasting as that’s the second year in a row he’s played a smug but talented upstart Jew scamming his way to the top of his field in post-war NYC

Alasdair Gray’s sardonic definition of postmodernism now reads like a prescient description of tech bros’ AI triumphalism

i did one of those ‘my books of the year’ things: sigmaportfolio.substack.com/p/cultural-h...

Thank you all, the update than we can barely believe we get to make. To everyone who supported us through this last month, we couldn’t have even come close to this outcome without you all. Have a peaceful festive period, we’ll see you in the bookshop soon 🧡

glad to be ahead once again

dear @rianjohnson.bsky.social did i miss the Gravity’s Rainbow reference in Wake Up Dead Man??

great to see national recognition for Phantom Limb at last night’s Saltire Awards!

We need your help. @waterstones.bsky.social, without any direct communication with us, will be opening their 6th Edinburgh branch less than 100 metres from our front door at the Foot of the Walk in Leith. Please read on for more information www.heraldscotland.com/news/2562908... (1/2)

happy On the Calculation of Volume Day to all who celebrate. i’m wearing my shirt to mark it

Tonight! Come along for what promises to be a stimulating and provocative discussion about literature and how it interrogates our dark pasts, both personal and national.

utterly depressing to read of the plans to demolish Argyle House, another modernist jewel potentially disappearing from Edinburgh’s urban fabric after the loss of the RBS building on Dundas Street.

Looking forward to talking to the great Swiss novelist Christian Kracht about confronting the dark legacies of twentieth century European history in his latest book, Eurotrash, at Waterstones West End. Tickets available here: www.waterstones.com/events/chris...

really sorry to hear of the passing of Peter Watkins. La Commune is easily one of the best depictions of revolutionary politics i have ever seen and i know of no one else whose work was so committed to interrogating how the media are complicit with imposing the agenda of capital

The high modernism of Glasgow novelist Alexander Trocchi has often been overshadowed by his low living. At the centenary of his birth, can we discern a meaningful literary legacy beyond his associations with existentialism, Situationism and counterculture? tribunemag.co.uk/2025/08/salt...

we must bring these stakes back into criticism

my band Shinlifter have their EP launch on Saturday and with impeccable timing our Instagram has been hacked so we’ve lost our main channel for promoting it. if anyone wanted to help share this brilliant poster by my pal Grace there, here or elsewhere we’d be very grateful!

It has been such a great honour to be one of Krasznahorkai's interpreters into English (since 2008), along with George Szirtes and John Batki. I also have to mention the visionary New Directions and my beyond stellar editor Declan Spring 🧡 www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/b...

in honour of Krasznahorkai’s Nobel, here’s a video of me and my buds at the bar recreating the iconic scene from The Melancholy of Resistance/The Werckmeister Harmonies on my 30th birthday in 2019

when i saw László Krasznahorkai at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2012, the interviewer asked him to give some context for the reading he was about to give and he bluntly replied, ‘No, this is literature!’ then launched into a spellbinding twenty minute monologue from Satantango

can’t believe the Nobel went to a guy who i’ve genuinely read all the available books in English by. so pleased for László!!!

obsessively consuming the biggest release in American pop culture this week

life achievement unlocked: visiting every poet’s grave mentioned in The Smiths’ Cemetery Gates

FAO Your Party

obsessed with Bob Dylan’s new dripped out look wearing a North Face with the hood up on stage

this is quite the effusive cover quote. too bad it wasn’t for the book it was on as i’d probably have bought it immediately.

can’t believe Nice N Sleazys kb’d Michael Shannon last night and he left shouting ‘Fuck this place. Fuck Glasgow’

The UK government will evacuate nine of the 40+ students in Gaza with scholarship at UK universities. My PhD student Shaimaa isn't included. We must now make sure they help the other students - email your MP today. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

i regret to inform you i’m now facilitating terrorism by selling Sally Rooney’s books at work.