They shelved my novel next to some book I never heard of.

I have approximately zero following on this app, sharing in the hopes it can get in front of the right person. A man I went to college with’s wife was kidnapped by ICE at a green card hearing, and he’s trying to find a reporter who will speak to him about the situation

The solution to the male loneliness epidemic is to normalise retreating to your library to produce a volume of digressive, idiosyncratic essays that remain an essential repository of humanist thought and skeptical inquiry 400+ years after your death.

Please sir, may I have some more?

My Rosh Hashanah cocktail: bonded apple brandy, bourbon, bitters, honey syrup, a twist. Meanwhile, for 5786, more peace, friends. More light, more love. Never again must mean no more.

Yeah and he was very Sad(e) about it.

the honeyed fruit Nâzim Hikmet, ‘Autumn’, tr Richard McKane

Tarkovsky gets drunk, shaves off moustache

Schattenfroh aside, there remain so many experimental works by small presses that fly under the radar. E.G: Old Men in Love by the great Alasdair Gray. Pub'd by Small Beer & prob. the most beautiful contemporary book object I own. & it totally disappeared. Other Examples?

Williams was a photographer for Jet magazine. He took the photo himself. The OG selfie. Iconic. Orangeburg, South Carolina, 1956

87-year-old Cecil Williams walked down the runway to "Neva Scared" during Actively Black and Spill's #NYFW show this weekend www.whatimreading.net/p/civil-righ...

Teaching Hawthorne in my Love and Death in the American Novel class tomorrow and my prime takeaway from this is, their radical ability (so they think) to recognize semiotic coherence notwithstanding, what a bunch of little fuckers these Puritan kids are:

So true! All I need in my university office: 4 decanters of Napoleonic brandy, a sword cane, the complete works of Walter Benjamin (unread), seven cats, a candelabra, a crucible, quicksilver, azoth, saltpeter, three invisible owls, whiteout. (Also, how hard is it to put chalk in all the classrooms?)

Sometimes when I see myself now I think, oh, you are older now. (My birthday is in two days, so I've been having feelings.)

On September nights heavy with pollen and absence, the body, dulled by antihistamines, drifts with the mind through Bachelard’s Water and Dreams, as unnamed aches and temporal echoes stir at the threshold of now and memory, murmuring just beneath the skin.

I crocheted Patti Smith’s Horses cover

People fairly criticize academia & the MFA but ignore the primary & beautiful ways that the U. can still make education sacred. As in, where else would I get access to the entire run of The Review of Contemporary Fiction from @Dalkey_Archive ? Diving in to the Coover issue today.

Pritzker: "I refuse to pretend that any of this is normal ... I refuse to fall into the pundit trap that demands we sacrifice vital constitutional rights if it's being done in the fake guise of fighting crime."

"September. It seems these luminous days will never end." Happy Salter day to all who celebrate.

Concerned that we are losing the necessary ratio. 15% of teachers/faculty should be irretrievably strange eccentrics. Every learning experience should have some element where in later life you can reflect with former classmates about how bizarre at least one (1) class per year was.

Galleys dropped! My weird novel abt art, the angels of history, Kabbalah, Yiddish poets, a dybbuk, & the dangers of trauma narratives. I pitched it (not well) as a Jewish Magic Mountain, but shorter. It's a strange book & I can't wait to share it with you. Feb 10th from Dzanc.

Went road tripping into the countryside to hit up used bookstores on my anniversary (perfect match, obviously) and found this for 9 dollars!

“How to speak of her? How not to do so?” —Jacques Derrida on Hélène Cixous

"He had allowed his daughters to use his library without restraint, and nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library." Robertson Davies makes the best case for the Humanities:

Pls stop what you are doing and read this entire report on Israel's murder of journalist Anas al-Sharif and five colleagues in Gaza City. "He characterized Israel’s threats as 'Silence or Death,' and he vowed not to be silent." It ends with his final message. www.dropsitenews.com/p/anas-al-sh...

"From the moment THREE MUSES was accepted for publication, it has been a dream—no fantasy—to be interviewed by @davidnaimon.bsky.social on his podcast 'Between the Covers.'” @tinhouse.bsky.social marthaannetoll.substack.com/p/between-th...

Not feeling seen by the new MS word grammar squiggle

White Mythology is farcical, fun, hilarious & wry. A featherlight fiction of ideas--like some wacked out mixture of Spinoza, Walker Percy and Pynchon on a not-so-paranoid day. This is to say, it's a wild ride of register shifts, and I think it'd be a great book to listen to.

"Who had set himself problems only he could solve, and had solved them, and made a mystery." A.S. Byatt ( my favorite writer) on Vermeer's "The View of Delft"...describing what making art, writing a novel, should be like...

Happy 40th to Nick Cave's 'Tupelo', the greatest apocalyptic nightmare in the entire ragged bass-blaring history of song. I still don't like AI & its thalidomide hands, but Dominick's tribute video leans into the shimmering haunted emptiness of the tool... youtube.com/watch?v=XnDm...

Severe malnutrition among under-5s in Gaza City has tripled in two weeks, charity says

OpenAI is an archetypal Orwellian agitprop brand, as it signals the opposite of what it actually excels at: EncloseIP

Leonora Carrington’s The Stone Door is out today from @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social! Read Joy Williams on Leonora Carrington from our archive here → books.substack.com/p/review-joy...

Gaza faces a severe humanitarian crisis as Israeli restrictions on aid lead to widespread malnutrition and starvation, with hospitals overwhelmed by malnourished children.

“From inside Nasser hospital, I am telling you: this is deliberate. This is preventable. And this must stop now.”

This is the plot of my new novel.

WHY HAVE NONE OF YOU SUGGESTED THE WHOLE OF JON FOSSE'S SEPTOLOGY YOU COWARDS

Delighted to publish five poems by Bolivian poet Melissa Sauma and translated by Ariel Francisco in BIG OTHER today! bigother.com/2025/07/20/f...

As if struck by some enchanter’s wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once started into wakefulness

Look, i know a lot of us live for the schadenfreude of the crash & burn but i don't think some of you realize just in how many ways we are all in the fucking plane. Some of the biggest buyers-into of this "AI" hype cycle have: your medical data, your identity data, control over the carceral system…

So everyone has a shelf of @sandtclassics.bsky.social now, right? So excited these arrived today! @paradiselaust.bsky.social @rezekjoe.bsky.social

Hope you'll take a look at this issue--we're very proud of our fiction selection, with its loose stormy theme and work by some of our favorite writers around. I think they read very nicely in order, too...

"...intellectual discomfort, which ambiguity often inspires, is undervalued." @ferrifrigida.bsky.social Great conversation between Katharine Coldiron and Lindsey Drager, two writers I really admire: www.vol1brooklyn.com/2025/06/20/w... Can't wait to dive into Out There in the Dark.

Reading Stevens' "Sunday Morning" on the first day of June (“desire for June and evening, tipped/ By the consummation of the swallow’s wings”) & struck by the hunger & awe of the 2nd stanza. How it loves & craves those moments where the mind, in intellect and spirit, meets the time-haunted world.

"Remember June's long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine... You've seen the refugees going nowhere, you've heard the executioners sing joyfully..." Adam Zagajewski (Clare Cavanagh, trans.)

In typical Chicago School fashion, tyranny of measurement is producing inefficiency of public service. More time wasted on tests & prep. More anxiety & discomfort with school. More frustrated & burnt-out teachers. Popperian reflexivity. Testing creates what it claims to disinterestedly measure.