None of ALA's featured speakers are librarians or connected to libraries in any meaningful way. It's all about booking celebrities, paying them huge honoraria and then passing that along to members in the form of obscene conference fees. What a racket!

Pleased to have a new story about life in a very odd small town in @leanmag.bsky.social the magazine for “non-protagonist-centered fiction”

We are officially LEANing into spring over here with issue #11! Matt Leibel's "Town" describes a sort of place that's bigger and smaller than the sum of its parts. Meanwhile Selen Ozturk's story "Aurora" is all about the push-and-pull between a story and its writer. www.lean-mag.com

In the spirit of practicing what I preach here's a non-protagonist-centered short story about Vikings, Christianity and what happens when the present meets the past. clereviewofbooks.com/if-the-vikin...

In the spirit of practicing what I preach here's a non-protagonist-centered short story about Vikings, Christianity and what happens when the present meets the past. clereviewofbooks.com/if-the-vikin...

Here's an essay I wrote calling on lit mags to use their about pages to tell us about the kind of writing they publish. litmagnews.substack.com/p/what-are-o...

Here's an essay I wrote calling on lit mags to use their about pages to tell us about the kind of writing they publish. litmagnews.substack.com/p/what-are-o...

Check out my short story “Economy of Language” in @leanmag.bsky.social! This one was arduous to write, by which I mean that I had a great time. Very excited that it found a home in a magazine I admire so much www.lean-mag.com/economyoflan...

LEAN magazine is here for the holidays with Issue #10 Sophie Drukman-Feldstein's "Economy of Language" depicts a world of exhaustible speech - you better watch what you say Meanwhile Owen Yingling's "Mene Mene" is a story of uncertain resurrection www.lean-mag.com

LEAN Magazine is open for business! Please send along your work. LEAN has mostly focused on fiction but we're very interested in memoir, especially the kind that evokes the contexts and conditions of life, sidelining the individual for the sake of conveying useful information

Another translation published! Check out my translation of Diego Lama’s story “The Silent City” in LEAN. A big thanks to Semyon Khokhlov for featuring us!

LEAN magazine is back at it with issue #9! Diego Lama's "The Silent City," translated by Rose Facchini, portrays a besieged city expanding toward the infinite. Stephen Mortland's amazing story "Three Sofias" is all about promiscuous acts of attention. www.lean-mag.com

LEAN magazine is back at it with issue #9! Diego Lama's "The Silent City," translated by Rose Facchini, portrays a besieged city expanding toward the infinite. Stephen Mortland's amazing story "Three Sofias" is all about promiscuous acts of attention. www.lean-mag.com

The new LEAN Magazine - Issue 8 - is here! Featuring Jon Conley's story of a hot day at the beach where the people aren't quite right. And a story by Jon Doughboy that stirs up a heteroglossic stew on a very clear night in Idaho. www.lean-mag.com

The new LEAN Magazine - Issue 8 - is here! Featuring Jon Conley's story of a hot day at the beach where the people aren't quite right. And a story by Jon Doughboy that stirs up a heteroglossic stew on a very clear night in Idaho. www.lean-mag.com

Very excited to share this essay about the great German author Alexander Kluge whose unusual work is all about common human feelings and "happy endings that don't lie." www.full-stop.net/2025/03/06/f...

Very excited to share this essay about the great German author Alexander Kluge whose unusual work is all about common human feelings and "happy endings that don't lie." www.full-stop.net/2025/03/06/f...

"It's really not so easy to find sentences that explain who you are. But maybe it's not so important, either." ---Jenny Erpenbeck

There's nothing essential about narrative modes and that's especially true when it comes to their relation to protagonism. 3rd person can be used to center an individual just as 1st person can be used to sideline them.

There's nothing essential about narrative modes and that's especially true when it comes to their relation to protagonism. 3rd person can be used to center an individual just as 1st person can be used to sideline them.

Self-centered protagonism is a problem that demands formal solutions. It's not enough for a character to be "self-aware" or even to look out beyond themselves because such looking can easily turn into self-affirmation.

Anyway, it's a really great work out recently from @spurleditions.bsky.social in a new translation by Dana Lupo

The narrative does not present this primarily as a problem for the hero but rather as a problem for other people, and that's precisely because this novel does not subscribe to the modern dogma of protagonist supremacy

The utopian novel The Known Southern Land (1676) is the kind of early work that can help us understand the blind spots of the modern novel's insistence on the supremacy of the protagonist...

The utopian novel The Known Southern Land (1676) is the kind of early work that can help us understand the blind spots of the modern novel's insistence on the supremacy of the protagonist...

LEAN magazine is open for non-protagonist-centered business. Are you tired of lit that doggedly tracks the private concerns of an individual? Do you think the individual story is always just one element in a larger human situation? If you do, send your stuff to LEAN!

The 1st issue of LEAN - with work by Caren Beilin and Tom Comitta - is now in print! It'll soon be available for free in Philly bookstores and cafes but I'm also giving 10 away to anyone outside the city. Just DM me if you'd like one!

LEAN #7 is here! A blast from the past: Alphonse Daudet's story "A Game of Billiards" (1873) in a new translation by Elliot Menard And the present: Two stories by contemporary Italian writer Diego Lama translated by Rose Facchini www.lean-mag.com

LEAN #7 is here! A blast from the past: Alphonse Daudet's story "A Game of Billiards" (1873) in a new translation by Elliot Menard And the present: Two stories by contemporary Italian writer Diego Lama translated by Rose Facchini www.lean-mag.com

The 1st issue of LEAN - with work by Caren Beilin and Tom Comitta - is now in print! It'll soon be available for free in Philly bookstores and cafes but I'm also giving 10 away to anyone outside the city. Just DM me if you'd like one!

LEAN is not just for fiction. Memoir has all sorts of non-protagonist-centered possibilities (really!) and there are some fascinating examples from Gluckel of Hameln's Memoirs to Alexander Kluge's Air Raid to Hua Hsu's recent Stay True. So send your unorthodox memoir along!

LEAN magazine is open for non-protagonist-centered business. Are you tired of lit that doggedly tracks the private concerns of an individual? Do you think the individual story is always just one element in a larger human situation? If you do, send your stuff to LEAN!

Listen to me. You have to go to Ndakaaru. You have to find your little brother. At any cost. Do you hear? You have to bring him back here, to Kayar. Dead or alive. Even just his bones. Do you hear? --from Ken Bugul's Coming and Going at lean-mag.com

The new issue of LEAN is here! It features an excerpt from Senegalese writer Ken Bugul's novel Coming and Going (originally Aller et Retour) in a translation by Julianna Blair Watson and Hugo Bujon. www.lean-mag.com

Listen to me. You have to go to Ndakaaru. You have to find your little brother. At any cost. Do you hear? You have to bring him back here, to Kayar. Dead or alive. Even just his bones. Do you hear? --from Ken Bugul's Coming and Going at lean-mag.com

The new issue of LEAN is here! It features an excerpt from Senegalese writer Ken Bugul's novel Coming and Going (originally Aller et Retour) in a translation by Julianna Blair Watson and Hugo Bujon. www.lean-mag.com

In the usual telling, the Pied Piper is a mercenary who punishes the people of Hamelin for greedily welshing on their agreement, but in Ian Maxton's retelling the Piper is a trickster figure who puts the people to a moral test... www.lean-mag.com/rats

You'll never look at a bouquet of dried flowers in quite the same way again after reading Tor Ulven's "The Bouquet Hanging by a Thread", appearing for the first time in English in a translation by Jordan Barger in the latest issue of LEAN! www.lean-mag.com/ulven

The fifth issue of LEAN is here! It features Ian Maxton's retelling of the Pied Piper tale, and two pieces, appearing for the first time in English translation by Jordan Barger, by the great Norwegian author Tor Ulven. www.lean-mag.com

Really excited to share this essay about the capacity of non-protagonist-centered fiction to depict common human experience through parts of the body. With readings of Nanni Balestrini's The Unseen and Fowzia Karimi's Above Us the Milky Way. www.full-stop.net/2024/01/11/f...

Writers of the world, LEAN magazine is open for non-protagonist-centered business! We think there's a lot more to any story than a protagonist's journey. If you agree, send in your work. And Happy New Year!

We can't, as Lukacs stresses, resurrect the Greek world, but we should, for our health, lean into its facts: "man does not stand alone...his relations to others and the structures which arise therefrom are as full of substance as he is himself."

The problem with treating a fictional character like a real person is not that it's critically naïve (Toril Moi has decisively put that idea to rest) but rather that it supercharges the centrality of the protagonist such that we read the text even more through them.

#BSkyHistorians! Emily Marker won the George Louis Beer Prize from @ahahistorians.bsky.social for her #CornellPress book "Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era" - www.historians.org/research-and... Check out more here: www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

"Oh! To enter the castle I had seen, and which existed because I had seen it! In Rachilde's "The Hermetic Castle" - in the latest issue of LEAN - the seductive power of manifestation meets the hard borders of the world. www.lean-mag.com/castle

The elusive Radiant City at the heart of Kyra Simone's "Vacancy, No Shortage of Light" - featured in the latest issue of LEAN - "has been designed strategically to account for the death of the street." www.lean-mag.com/vacancy

In the spirit of no dumb questions: How do you pronounce Bluesky? Is it the standard with a long "i" sound at the end? Or, the much better alternative, a long "e" sound like with brewski? I really hope it's the second!

The fourth issue of LEAN is here! Check out the first English version of Rachilde's "The Hermetic Castle," in a translation by Elliot Menard, and Kyra Simone's "Vacancy, No Shortage of Light," an excerpt from her novel-in-progress. www.lean-mag.com

One thing contemporary literature takes entirely for granted is that the experience of a particular individual can stand for large social forces/historical events. There's very little skepticism about this idea right now, and most reviews just treat it as a statement of fact...