How terrible & beautiful not to know ourselves:

Birthday dram

On the eve of MLA, a model of collegiality worth considering. (From @keironpim.bsky.social 's stunning bio of Joseph Roth) "Anyone who insulted them would be challenged to a duel...unscarred cheeks and a nose without a nick in it were unworthy of an academic in the genuine German tradition."

Chag Sameach

Important not to even stock other books.

I'm a huge fan of Angela Woodward. More people need to read her strange, hilarious sui generis work. AFTERLIFE is my most anticipated book of the spring...

Can't wait to hear the trolling re relative stress and caesurae in dactylic hexameter...

I reviewed Gabriele Tergit's THE EFFINGERS, a mighty and brilliant and extremely readable book out now in English thanks to a cracking translation by Sophie Duvernoy >>> www.theguardian.com/books/2025/d...

Happy to see my forthcoming novel,The Tavern at the End of History on @jewishbookcouncil.bsky.social recommended winter reading list. A great book for all the readers in your life who dig dybbuks, art, unhelpful baseball references & diasporic longing! www.jewishbookcouncil.org/pb-daily/jbc...

Pretty good company...

Sure, I’m out of a contract, struggling to finish this novel, and have no clue what’ll happen next in my career, but I’m writing exactly the kind of dark, sad, weird, violent, magical mosaic of a book I want to write and that’s what this whole gig is really about.

In case you, like me, have not yet found this incredible resource/s by @annakornbluh.bsky.social and a few others, IT IS SO GREAT!!! 🙌🔥🙌 against-a-i.com

@annakornbluh.bsky.social (a scholar I've long-admired) is a hero in my dept for her Against AI website as we try to stem our collaboration w/ apocalypse Meanwhile, my own (v. Jewish) new novel about how the stories we tell about the past shape the future www.dzancbooks.org/all-titles/p...

Ah, yes. The "3-women-per-day" school of narratology: "The scenes in Balzac or in Dostoyevsky (the last great Balzacian of the novel form) reflects...a beauty that is very rare...that everyone has known (or at least glimpsed) in the course of his own life." -Kundera, The Curtain

Big mistake. No good mornings, here.

did anyone else know pedro pascal was john ashbery

Started cobbling together the nonfiction and arts sections of the holiday catalog. First time in a couple years, & you better believe we’re coming back hard.

We’ve progressed from watching the baseball game to being held hostage by the baseball game.

Confidence goals 🪶

Northampton, MA #NoKings

Harrisburg, PA — there are so many older women in banana suits at the Capitol holding antifa signs and none of that sentence would have made sense to me 10 years ago

The 1970s (widely defined: '66-81) were the single greatest decade for the American Novel. Also, most short novels should be a lot longer.

Getting in on the Rothko discourse since 2021. (The Tavern at the End of History from Dzanc in February 2026). Also, always nice to be read by a great writer...

"...caught like a message on an electric wire, between who was seeing whom and how..." —The Tavern at the End of History, the next @morriscollins.bsky.social novel, forthcoming in 2026 from Dzanc

I've always been fond of my own signed copy of All Souls, with post-reading message. In that it turned up secondhand, maybe Javier's prophecy was correct!

in the company of many many bsky.app/profile/anna...

Don't miss today's conversation with @olgaravn.bsky.social. Witches, folk magic, alchemy, the fear of women gathering, animating the archive through ritual & the imagination, & much more Audio📻: tinhouse.com/podcast/olga... @ndbooks.bsky.social @bookhugpress.bsky.social @vikingbooksuk.bsky.social

just gonna have to keep saying, in company of so many others: we are jewish faculty against the astroturf antisemitism persecution of jewish faculty by our own universities, by online hate groups, and by the regime www.thenation.com/article/soci...

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?

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.