In the post today, the third volume of the new translation, this one by Peter Bush. And for under a tenner from Blackwell's.

"I cannot imagine a dinner party that would not be improved by violence." For dinner party, read book club. oldoldoldoldnew.substack.com/p/cioran-xv

"The crisis for the novel in our time is that there is no crisis." this-space.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-...

"Lightness and humor are qualities I hold in very high regard. The artists of the last century who most excite me—Stravinsky, Picasso, Klee, Eliot, Proust, Kafka—all possess them." www.liberation.fr/culture/livr...

"Victory to Vietnamese" (sic) graffiti still visible on the line between Fratton and Portsmouth & Southsea stations.

New podcast from the European Graduate School featuring interviews with Christopher Fynsk and Avital Ronell. shows.acast.com/egs-podcast/...

Anyone in the UK or who has access to iPlayer, Bryan Magee's series from the 80s The Great Philosophers is being repeated tonight on BBC4. www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

On Byung-Chul Han's The Crisis of Narration. this-space.blogspot.com/2025/09/the-...

Nearly 20 years ago Arcade books announced Richard Howard's translation of Cioran's Cahiers. There was even a cover. But it never appeared. Searching for news just now, I discovered this: dustyhope.com/bel/emil-cio...

Found this on a secondhand stall selling supermarket fiction.

Lars Iyer has a new website now that Typepad is closing down. larsiyer.co.uk

Over a year since it was published and this is only the second review. Very welcome nonetheless. bigother.com/2025/09/10/c...

How can we sleep? A post in response to reading @avecsesdoigts.bsky.social's translation of volume 2 of In Search of Lost Time. this-space.blogspot.com/2025/09/read...

"In an in-between time in which nothing begins or ends, in which blank patience takes the place of activity, I picked two books from my shelves stubbornly remote from utility, lacking the intimacy of possession" this-space.blogspot.com/2025/08/read...

An interview with Rosalind Belben on the reissue of her 1979 novel Dreaming of Dead People. electricliterature.com/rosalind-bel...

Please help. Our department runs a groundbreaking part-time degree programme in English Literature and Community Engagement, known as ELCE, designed for mature students who didn't or couldn't do a degree at 18. The University of Bristol has decided to close it. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

"Imagine that we do not know what blindness is." Very impressive essay on Autism by Sinéad Murphy. brownstone.org/articles/wha...

Claude Monet looks like the van in Dumb & Dumber. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqHU...

I found this 1965 US paperback on a sweltering day in Portsmouth, June 1987, the day Thatcher's Tories were elected for the third time. The page edges are tinted dark pink.

Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben review – rivals anything by Virginia Woolf

On this day, 20 years since Jean Charles de Menezes was shot in the head by British police, I remember this entry to the TLS's 2008 Books of the Year. As these same marchers are arrested for publically opposing genocide, I wonder who is annihilating these "cosseted freedoms".

Out next month from And Other Stories. www.andotherstories.org/dreaming-of-...

A short post on three books I read and re-read this year.

Read the first line in a bookshop in Southsea in the Summer of 1989. One of those key moments in a reading life. The original title is Der Chinese des Schmerzes but Ralph Manheim's renaming is more appropriate.

"I'm one of these people who can't read Proust. I find it unbelievably boring, all the mopey kid stuff. You know, 'For fuck's sake, go and kick a ball around or something.'" newleftreview.org/sidecar/post... Being as polite as I can, I'm not keen on Geoff Dyer.

We shall fight on the polluted beaches. We shall fight on the deserted High Streets. We shall fight in the barren fields and in the food banks. We shall fight in the crowded waiting rooms. We shall never surrender our private equity consultancies.

Began to listen to a podcast about modernism. One of the presenters claims the 19thC novel is famous for its opening lines while "there's no great opening line of a modernist novel". podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

PN Review has a special edition on language, with eight essays free to read, including Gabriel Josipovici's The Myth of the Native Language: www.pnreview.co.uk/archive/the-...

The graphic artist has legged it.

This novel surprised me enough to prompt what I hestitate to call a review. this-space.blogspot.com/2025/06/on-c...

The Economist article is something to behold, and such a shame it is anonymous. Can anyone have a guess who wrote it? The tweet below doesn't include a link, so here it is: archive.ph/CP8rW

Rosalind Belben's great novel Dreaming of Dead People from 1979 is being reissued in August by And Other Stories. www.andotherstories.org/authors/rosa...

"I sought out writers who made a concern of writing, not out of some tedious self-involvement, but to attend to what writing did and where it took you." www.booksofsomesubstance.com/blog/tnabwmk...

I have written a long post about submission and resistance to AI-generated literature. this-space.blogspot.com/2025/05/a-mi...

A post about what enabled me to write 39 blog posts every day for 39 days.

Just got this in the post. You can probably guess why I ordered it. See fallowmedia.com

Early stories from Bernhard due later this year, translated by @shirtysleeves.bsky.social Really could do with Manfred Mittermayer's biography too.

"For a long time I thought writing was a job of work. I'm now convinced that it's an inner event, a 'non-work' that you accomplish, above all, by emptying yourself out, and allowing what's already self-evident to percolate through." – Duras spurious.typepad.com/spurious/201...

Today Summer was stuffed through my letterbox.

When I stopped enjoying novels and sought to understand why. this-space.blogspot.com/2025/03/a-me...

Started re-reading this as soon as I'd finished it.

Scott Abbott on a riverboat with Peter Handke.

Turned a blind eye to the price because the chapter in the Paris Review was so good. www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/08...

“Microdisney’s song Fiction Land. It starts off gently. Halfway through, he was roaring his head off. That’s what I really liked about them. People want a sad song to be introspective. Microdisney didn’t do that. They did sad songs but there was a ferocity to them.” www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdDg...

After years of complaining that his essays on Handke and Bernhard remained untranslated, here they are, at last.

For a short time in my student days I had a soft red pencil with which I underlined passages in books. I loved it. Then it disappeared and I was annoyed. Now I open books from that time and cringe. But perhaps there's something to be learned from such innocence.

John Self shouldn't be reviewing books like this. He should stick to middlebrow Booker Prize fiction. www.ft.com/content/fdf3...

Today we celebrate the birthday of one of the great thinkers of our time. But enough about me. It's also the centenary of Gilles Deleuze's birth. euppublishingblog.com/2025/01/16/t...