Just found my retirement home.

László Nemes’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Southern Gothic fairytale, OUTER DARK, is set to start filming early next year.

We are poorer as a society for allowing politics to saturate every aspect of our lives: our relationships, our Literature, our idle entertainments. I suppose it might be less regrettable if we’d gotten something in exchanging our souls for the pursuit of power, but we haven’t.

The conditions fiction writers face today are far less grim than the ones James Joyce faced in 1914 when he began writing ULYSSES. While Europe became a slaughterhouse, Joyce wrote on. Artists are called to create works of lasting beauty, no matter the conditions. NOT doing so is grim.

I'm hearing that The End Times (a short novel told in the form of a newspaper delivered over the course of a year) is printing its first edition today. You've still got a chance to sign yourself or a friend up with @badhandbooks.bsky.social right here : badhandbooks.com/preorders/th...

This week reminded me of Will Rogers’s famous quote: “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”

Louis C.K. was on Maher a few weeks back, talking about his novel. He bragged about not doing any research for it (“I just made it up”), which struck me as a bizarre thing for a writer to admit. I’ve read a few paragraphs floating around SM and research ain’t all he didn’t do. This is AWFUL prose.

My tale of gunplay and regret in a convenience store has been published by Pistol Jim Press. pistoljimpress.substack.com/p/filthy-hab...

Don’t know how many times I read “Sailing to Byzantium” before I realized it rhymed. Chalk that up to Yeats’s craftsmanship or me being an idgit (or a combination of both).

Senate Democrats voted to end the shutdown right when their upper middle class donors started missing their flights.

I don’t care how good A.I. gets, it’ll never approach Yeats. In a million years, ChatGPT couldn’t produce “disheveled wandering stars.” It couldn’t even produce “deep wood’s woven shade.”

Watching this 1998 production of KING LEAR with Ian Holm (best Lear I’ve ever seen). Lear truly wants to be just dead enough to enjoy it (“while we unburdened crawl toward death”), and it occurs to me that this particular desire destroys an awful lot of people.

This morning I was thinking about something Brian Evenson told me, that Michael Ondaatje’s THE ENGLISH PATIENT contained some of the finest prose in the history of the language. Sounded a bit hyperbolic to me then, but I think Brian was onto something…

“Not trying to be a jerk here” is a great way to start a post where you’ll excel at being a jerk.

William Faulkner on writing SANCTUARY: “I began to think of myself again as a printed object. I began to think of books in terms of possible money. I decided I might just as well make some of it myself."

No reputable literary agent will ever ask you for money. No reputable agent will charge a prospective client a “reading fee.” A legitimate literary agent takes a 15-20% commission from your book advance. If the agent doesn’t sell the book, s/he takes nothing.

EXCLUSIVE: I sat down with Curtis Sliwa’s campaign manager (pictured below) to discuss their strategy for Tuesday’s mayoral election.

To take my mind off my aching back, I built another Stevie Ray Vaughan “First Wife” Stratocaster: 22 Jumbo frets, rosewood fretboard, maple neck, alder body, Fender locking tuners and Texas Special pickups, Greer Amps neck-plate.

This morning, I ranked Cormac McCarthy’s best novels (my ranking changes from year to year).

A map of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha.

Cleanth Brooks’ THE YOKNAPATAWPHA COUNTRY is the best one-volume study of William Faulkner’s fiction I’ve read. If you’re a fan of Faulkner, you should absolutely check out this remarkably insightful little book.

My 90-year-old grandfather (on the right) is performing at this community center with his country band tonight. He’s gone full-Nashville. Or, at the very least, full-Branson.

“Then I get to thinking about what would be enough, and if it’s even out there or possible, a job that recognizes my efforts and keeps me close to who and what I love.”

It’s amateur blacksmithing season again. Might make a new knife, might make a mess. Time will tell.

I was very lucky to find a great agent. But boy have I heard some horror stories. And this is one of the reddest of red flags.

I find it interesting that once T.S. Eliot convinced Virginia Woolf to read James Joyce’s ULYSSES, Woolf objected to the novel’s frank portrayal of working class life and bodily functions—not the prurient or blasphemous material that riled up censors in the US/UK.

Low-stakes hills I will die on: • Hanging toilet paper underhand (rolling toward wall) is utter barbarism. • Using an apostrophe with a plural S is not protected speech and must be criminalized. • Plantain is pronounced “PLAN-ten” not “plan-TAIN.” Violators should be forced to eat scotch bonnets.

Big congrats to the great Keith Rosson!

Your American Prometheus is Robert Oppenheimer; mine is Robert Johnson. We are not the same.

My short story ‘The Unspoken’ online @grantamag.bsky.social granta.com/the-unspoken/

True Detective reboot looks promising.

A fantastic history of 19th century America, one that demonstrates how every social reform in the US—abolition, women’s rights, etc—grew out of American Protestantism, specifically its Puritan New England strain, the heirs of which turned those movements into a secular religion.

Have always loved this photograph of the giants of literary Modernism.

Time for some Friday afternoon backyard reading!

Who else up waging sex warfare?

RELEASE DAY: RIGHTEOUS TRASH, the third book in my Boise Noir trilogy, is out today! It's got: 1. The wildest robbery I've ever written. 2. More rounds expended than a Peckinpah film. 3. Snarky sibling rivalry. 4. Tons of stuff done blown up gud. 5. Link in 🧵!

I love this book so much and I am so excited it’s out in the world now. If your weekend needs a little mayhem, you absolutely can not go wrong with RIGHTEOUS TRASH.

There's a special pleasure to being in the UK and picking up a copy of @thetls.bsky.social with my column at the back. Because I write for publications based abroad (i.e. not in Germany) it's a rare experience.

Congratulations to @caseystegman.com on the sale of KILL CURRENT! #TeamTriada #BookSky

Thank you, Uwe! This is a dream come true.

I’ve known quite a few Marines and they were all tattooed: none had a Totenkopf, though. The majority had the standard USMC bulldog, a few had (impressive!) American flag sleeves, some had the names of fallen comrades. The SS tat can’t be a common choice.

He’s an open one?

It's physically dangerous for me to be more hyped about @keithrosson.bsky.social's Coffin Moon after his incredible Fever House duology. A bleak and brutal vampire/vampire hunter revenge story in the vein of Near Dark. Feel free to mentally cast sex beast Bill Paxton.

Teaching BLOOD MERIDIAN this time, I’ve convinced myself that the Kid refuses to shoot the Judge in Chapter XX because: A) he’s not a murderer B) he can’t risk proving to himself that the Judge is immortal C) he doesn’t actually want to divest himself of Holden

In spite of the disruption to Amazon’s services, my Halloween costume was delivered today.

Next up in my American Villains class: William Faulkner’s SANCTUARY

You could drop this passage from Barbara Tuchman’s A DISTANT MIRROR right into BLOOD MERIDIAN with very little revision:

Lou Berney has some picks.