New to #Bluesky? Here's a starter pack for Bricks & Mortar Bookshops on the Island of Ireland #BookSky go.bsky.app/G4kmxVq

Happy (birth)Day! #FolkHorror classic Children of the Stones first hit the TV screen #OTD in 1977. ayearinthecountry.co.uk/children-of-...

"Of course … students cheat on their writing assignments – they are … taught to hit mechanical marks … improving their sentence structure, spelling & punctuation … [not] how to use writing to order & hone their thoughts … They're being asked to write like a chatbot– why wouldn't they use a chatbot?"

#SPFBO, eep!

“Strange Stories by Irish Women” #NollaigNamBan Anna Maria Hall Lady Wilde Charlotte Riddell Rosa Mulholland L. T. Meade B. M. Croker Lady Gregory Katharine Tynan Clotilde Graves Ethna Carbery Dora Sigerson Shorter Beatrice Grimshaw swanriverpress.ie/2019/02/stra...

I mentioned that I had been fortunate enough to make the cut for #SPFBO11, but I was too excited at the time to talk about, you know, the book itself. Well, this is it - Death at Hallowtide. #Fantasy sub-genres: cosy mystery / grimdark weather (yep, it's set in Ireland). #SPFBO books2read.com/dah

What will 2026 bring to me as an author? Good things, so far - I seem to have had the great good luck to have had my name pulled out of the #SPFBO hat. Once again, huge thanks are due to @marklawrenceauthor.bsky.social for services to #IndieAuthors. Let the games begin! mark---lawrence.blogspot.com

As we head into our 20th year of publishing We have the same 'mission statement' we did when we first started. To find stories that the mainstream thought too risky to publish. 31 books short listed or won lit prizes. 2 books adapted for BBC TV. Magic. @thebookseller.com

"I made a post about rules of reviewing, which led me back to an earlier post … and that could have led me back to still other posts … about criticism, … So I decided I would try to draw them all together so they are at least in one place." Paul Kincaid ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2025/12/26/o...

Dr No: Academic Dissent from the Johnson era to Trump

'Yeats and the Occult Imagination' - an essay by Gus Mitchell on @jstordaily.bsky.social daily.jstor.org/yeats-and-th...

What did the Midwinter Daemon bring to us? First (naturally), *my* book haul: three slim volumes comprising Mervyn Wall's two Fursey novels & Ray Bradbury's Zen and the Art of Writing; and the weighty (in every sense) Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz, tr. Max Lawton - h/t @theuntranslated.bsky.social

✴️ /｜\ //｜\\ ///｜\\\ ////｜\\\\ /////｜\\\\\ ｜ I hope that the festive season finds you happy and peaceful. If it is otherwise, I hope that the coming year brings relief, solace and better times.

Wait until you hear that LLMs can only train on digitized/datafied info. Most of the FACTS scholars use are in archives/libraries. Less than 1% of archival colletions worldwide have been digitized. Also: lots of facts are not even in archives, but in the attics.

Entering the US public domain in 2026: Franz Kafka's The Castle (english translation). More info behind window 20 of our advent-style countdown calendar for works entering the #publicdomain on Jan 1st: https://publicdomainreview.org/features/entering-the-public-domain/2026/ #PDin2026

Ask your library to order "Teaching James Joyce in the Twenty-First Century" (including a chapter from yours truly on how to teach the grammar of "Finnegans Wake" to students and first-time readers!) 🔗 👉 floridapress.org/978081308126...

Since we started in 2006 libraries have given our authors the space and support to talk about their stories and have promoted everything we are trying to do. Please support your local library. @leedslibraries.bsky.social @mcrlitfest.bsky.social @manclibraries.bsky.social

Elisabeth Sommerville (Canadian, born 1947) "The Skating Party", 2015. Lithograph on Paper, 51 × 38 cm. Private Collection. #art #painting #artist #BlueSkyArt

Let's hear from you writers, tell us a little bit about yourself, what projects you've on the go, what you've written, any events in the near future, or just drop your bio and links and follow and support each other #WritersLiftWednesday #Writers #Authors #WritersLift #BookSky 💙📚 alt text please

Storm's a comin' #StormBram

can't wait to hear who won the FIFA prize in literature

!! Ireland has a unique opportunity to end foxhunting on Dec 17th when the Dail will vote on a proposed ban. Please contact your TDs and ask them to support a ban. #speirgorm Print used with kind permission by @katelouisepowell.bsky.social, find her lovely work here: www.etsy.com/ie/shop/Kate...

OUR HAUNTED YEAR 2025 Our annual blog post looking back at what we did at Swan River Press this year. swanriverpress.ie/2025/12/our-...

What I’m wearing to the #Bluesky Christmas party

Banshee celebrates ten years in print @booksupstairs.bsky.social next Thursday 4 December! Join us from 6pm to raise a glass to the publication of issue 20 and hear from our brilliant contributors. Hosted by guest editor @clarakiyoko.bsky.social 🎄 booksupstairs.ie/all-events/l...

A grand day out with @bibliorefuses.bsky.social / @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social & @hardimanmk.bsky.social. Met @swanriverpress.bsky.social in the flesh (yes, books were bought), chatted pleasantly with @sinoistbooks.bsky.social, @renardpress.com & other publishers. 👏👏@dublinsmpressfair.bsky.social 📚

Thank you!!

"The late 1960s also saw the introduction of free secondary education, a move announced so suddenly the Department of Education had to assemble a temporary poetry textbook…" The 'temporary' book was Soundings, so fondly remembered that it was reprinted well after eventual retirement from school use.

Aaaah!😍

Twitter accounts are based in Russia. BlueSky accounts are based in homes with, frankly, too many books, plants, obsolete cables, and pieces of rustic pottery, that could do with a bit of a tidying up, to be honest.

Necromodernism - now that's a #Modernism I could really get behind!

In this Netflix series, Clare Danes plays an author whose novel is *two years* past the delivery date, but she asks for "another advance" from the publisher anyway. It's so realistic!

On "The Yellow Wall-paper" and other works, phantom limbs, arsenic poisoning, and other ingestations vajra.me/2025/11/11/c...

Companies and institutions have given up on the idea of service generally. Now, it’s all about training the customer to do the work for them – and most of us don’t want to work for the companies we’re paying for service.

I answered some questions about my #research for @unibonn.bsky.social, so now this short #interview exists: www.uni-bonn.de/en/news/in-t... (German version below) Thanks, as always, to the @humboldt-foundation.de for the support! #postdoc #complit #bureaucraticfiction #sciencecommunication

Congrats to Laure Hinckel for winning Le Grand Prix de traduction de la Ville d’Arles 2025 for her corruscating translation of Mircea Cărtărescu's Theodoros! actualitte.com/article/1273...

For me, Stoker's greatest work will always be his 1879 masterpiece, The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland.

Bram Stoker, Novelist, Biographer, Critic, Theatre Business Manager, #BornOnThisDay in 1847, in Clontarf, Dublin, Ireland

I'm going to use this as the jonbar point in my upcoming alternate-history novel.

You know what you need in your life right now? A book featuring a hard-boiled badger cop padding along the mean streets of the city & the mean paths of the forest, a flickering candle of decency in a world of darkness; that's what. Remington Platypus is a delight. 🦡📙

"An exceptional work, immersive, thought-provoking, and impossible to forget." This in a lovely email from Madison Clarke, a professional book marketeer who contacted me out of the blue. I'll go with that, Mads😁, just maybe not with the rest of it🙄 Find the exceptional work here books2read.com/FID/

This made me laugh so, so hard. (For those not 18th century nerds, I am the founder of the Samuel Richardson Society, which is in honor of a writer who has been dead for centuries & thus uninterested in book club scams)

Virginia Faulkner was smart as a whip, funny as a heart attack, unfiltered in her cigarettes and opinions, and utterly uninterested in talking about herself. So the last thing she would have wanted was for someone to write her biography. www.nebraskapress.un...

16 years ago today we opened the doors to Dublin's newest bookshop.That @gutterbookshop.bsky.social continues to thrive today brings me so much joy. We created something that brought people together & celebrated books & reading. I feel like I added something good to the world & I'm so proud of that.

Tthink I'm in love with @archive.org: The Modern Word is on the #WaybackMachine. Although Allen Ruch is painstakingly reconstituting this towering monument to #Modernist & #Postmodernist #Literature on his Shipwreck Library site, this process is far from complete. 1/2 web.archive.org/web/20140701...

Dipping into Lovecraft again on the e-reader, & was reminded on perusing Pickman's Model of his approving references in several stories to actual artists of the weird & fantastic. "I bet @johncoulthart.com has something on that," I thought. Of course he has... www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2...

It's Hallowe'en — time to mention my new book, Death at Hallowtide, written under an impenetrable pseudonym. Combining mystery & low fantasy, it is set in a (sadly, fictional) part of Ireland where the boundaries with the otherworld(s) are more porous than usual. 1/4 books2read.com/b/dah