“Everybody’s using AI for everything nowadays, and if you don’t, you’re a misfit outsider who should be stoned to death in the town square, and then resurrected virtually from your data so you can be stoned to death in the virtual town square, for infinity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/o...

This Colby Hall shitshow is a reminder to all journalists, editors, writers, that if you use AI—“in a limited way,” “like many editors” as “part of your editorial workflow,” etc—it’s a matter of *when*, not if, your entire reputation will be thoroughly fucking trashed. Take note.

!!!!!!!

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed. ~Jeanette Winterson

Can't believe a good thing has happened

Really wish the Atlantic had thought to ask the southern publisher (that's also bringing nancy's books back into print) if they had thoughts about Americans exoticizing the south. www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

It’s wild how much of the solution here is just “invest in humans”

Reading John Banville's Venetian Vespers, which includes remarkable descriptions of both drunkenness and urination. #FridayReads

sometimes student evaluations are so hurtful

My dad’s obituary: www.altogetherfuneral.com/obituaries/d...

“You will forget. You will forget that this is you.” —L’homme atlantique, Marguerite Duras

I posted a fair amount of promotional stuff around the release of my memoir SHE'S UNDER HERE. Did it help? Who knows. But this interview with Guardian does a good job of capturing what the book is about and why I wrote it. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Bye, Geno. (But respect to the UConn women.) On to the final!

Gino! Language!

An environmental science major and part of the University of South Carolina’s Honors College, Edwards also shines in the classroom.”

Go Gamecocks. (I could really use this.)

I asked A.I. to complete my novel using my own writing style and it did my laundry, went shopping, cleaned the kitchen and spent the rest of the day dicking around online.

Julia Phillips speaks at The Open Book today at 6 pm. Campus Room, Capstone Building, University of South Carolina. She's awesome, it's free, and there will be snacks.

What memoir are y’all talking vaguely about? (I’ve been under a sad rock.)

Will Hoyle Blackwell, Jr., 11/15/39-3/28/26. Botanist and polymath. RIP, Dad.

Today at 6 pm! Free and open to all.

Social media meme where we name 5 canonical writers who would have published at least 5 fewer books if they were writing and publishing today.

The historians will call the Trump presidencies the end of the American century.

"In the first seven months of his second term, authorities arrested and detained parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children — a number that, if the pace held up, will have roughly doubled by now. That’s an average of more than 50 U.S. citizen kids a day with a parent pulled into detention."

I need this particular small joy.

Egon Schiele's final palette.

"The power to change one's life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark... The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?" —James Salter, LIGHT YEARS

new on our mainpage: "Sweet," by Thora Dahlke: wigleaf.com

This is the best thing I have read in a while. Emily Tucker is brave to write this

I Cheerfully Refuse. Great motto. Great book. Leif Enger will discuss his latest novel at The Open Book, University of South Carolina, Wednesday, 3/25. Details here: sc.edu/study/colleg...

Love this. (Submission window=June.)

"Berger as a stylist, with his movements between delicacy and density, is a butterfly catcher one second and a stoneworker the next." Ben Lerner on John Berger's Booker Prize winning novel G. in the NYRB. Highly recommended. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Today at 6pm, University of South Carolina. (The Open Book is always free and open to all!)

Ross Gay speaks tomorrow evening at the University of South Carolina: Campus Room, Capstone Building, 6-7 pm, followed by book signing and refreshments. Free and open to all!

Monday book talks and Wednesday author visits. Ross Gay, Leif Enger, Julia Phillips. Plus a special one-night event with Percival Everett on April 23. Visit the below link for dates and details.

Always Crashing is now open for print and online submissions In print, we are especially looking for work that takes particular advantage of its status as a printed object For online, we are particularly looking for work that opens our understand of what that space can be

Come get an MFA in Creative Writing at Missouri State! We are taking applications for this fall! Every admitted student will be offered a full teaching assistantship. Pick a track in fiction or poetry with other options. Work on @mooncitypress.bsky.social and @mooncityreview.bsky.social. Info below.

I'm traveling to Albuquerque later this year and 100% hitting this up! Hey look, @wvupress.bsky.social! Maybe PIT will do the same for us?

Facing the reality that "Medicare pays for home hospice" means about five hours a week of care, which is ... not enough for a bed-ridden person.

Monday book talks and Wednesday author visits. Ross Gay, Leif Enger, Julia Phillips. Plus a special one-night event with Percival Everett on April 23. Visit the below link for dates and details.

The book reopens: The Open Book's 2026 series starts next week at the University of South Carolina. Free and open to all! sc.edu/study/colleg...

🖤 Georges Perec at his desk (in his apartment on rue Linné, Paris, shortly after receiving the 1978 Prix Médicis for *Life: A User’s Manual*)

i’m sorry to learn the great Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes has died. what an amazing body of work he has left

In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection. Andrei Tarkovsky

An intriguing list.

No Baltimore for me, but have fun, all you AWP kids!

“…goes to language, wounded by reality, seeking reality.” (“…zur Sprache geht, wirklichkeitswund und wirklichkeitssuchend.”) — Paul Celan, “Bremen Speech”

It's time! Nominations are now open for the 2026 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, which will be given to a work of imaginative fiction, published in 2025, that reflects the concepts and ideas that were central to Ursula’s own work.