‘A great book review can be just as rich, entertaining, and insightful as a great short story. Criticism is literature—a mercurial species of creative nonfiction that fills the shape of its container.’ Article includes John Updike’s 6 rules for reviewers, & 4 more of the writer’s own.

‘ I hope that New Zealand stops confusing resilience with resignation. We are not at our best when we shrug and say, “that’s just how it is.” We are at our best when we choose to fix what is broken.’

Reality is more farfetched than fiction.

Don't know if @elizabethknoxnz.bsky.social is still teaching her course on world-building (with her insightful observations on when it stops serving the story and becomes an end in itself) at @modernletters.bsky.social, but we might have been save decades of pain if James Cameron has signed up.

Come at me bro.

The kind that goes through you like a skewer

‘Slightly haunted but manageable’: new signs cause confusion – and delight – in Christchurch

'In our current AI hype hellscape, restricting “AI-authored content” is not a terrible idea. (If I hadn’t been caught in the crossfire, I would have gone “huh. good.” and moved on with my day.)' Jiaqiao Liu (MA21) on their book Dear Alter, disqualified from the Ockhams for using AI - or does it?

The Cut-Up Machine: mix up the words you enter in a form using the techniques described by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin www.languageisavirus.com/cutupmachine...

‘Kākā used to be so abundant they were like fish of the air.’

Best books from across the ditch www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

One more piece of wonderful news that we're bursting to share before we close up shop: we're publishing Night, Ma by Elizabeth Knox in April 2026! @elizabethknoxnz.bsky.social Cover: Todd Atticus, @toddatticus.bsky.social

Remember how I said I have it written into my foreign-language contracts that my work has to be translated by an actual human? This shit is why. Those book translations are gonna suck. They'll save money putting out books that are going to be painful to read. That's not a great long-term strategy.

Three #pukapuka recs from me, in the annual @modernletters.bsky.social newsletter: 👁️‍🗨️ The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, edited by John Freeman. 🌊 Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield. 🐷 Animalia, by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (translated from the French by Frank Wynne).

Hahahha what a week

The Bulletin’s 2025 year in review

The Four Techbros of the Apocalypse! Which one is slightly worse than the other three? You can vote!

The only good part of this whole "AI" nonsense is that it's forcing us to examine why genuine art is so important to us as a species.

Have started thinking about how I will do research now that Google cant be trusted. It will be funner but slower. Thinking about just going to talk to people again, turning up at their door unannounced with a clipboard: ‘I came from NZ - can you tell me about _______ I need a reputable source.’

‘Elizabeth Knox navigates, with impressive skill and sensitivity, some of the very real anxieties confronting the young adults who will, I feel certain, be her many avid readers.’

While we were busy with the US Congress, major international news on trans healthcare. A New Zealand court announced an injunction on the far-right trans health care ban there. The court says that the biggest danger is posed by banning care. Big story for us from @transvestigations.bsky.social

These are a few of my favourite words …

Merry Christmas to Costa Botes; wherever he is now, he will have a guitar in his hands

weird how water is the source of all life (and spirit) and AI relies on it to distort what we used to take for granted as real and concrete.

'A falling knife has no handle', and other evergreen life advice from Hera Lindsay Bird

Caution: As previously warned, there are AI deepfakes of the terror attack in Australia and disinformation circulating. How do you spot and report them? Some ideas 🧵 #nzpol www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/5...

'New Zealand literature is an active and passionate industry. It keeps on keeping on, and acts as opposition to stupidity as a way of life.' The Readingroom 'best of 2025' includes Damien Wilkins, Joanna Cho (MA20) and this year's Letteri Creative Nonfiction Prize winner Niamh Vaughan.

Announcing the National Book Critics Circle 2025 Longlist for Nonfiction

‘We can’t put the quote of the year in the headline’ www.rnz.co.nz/life/people/...

So, the administration that wishes we’d just give up trying ALSO hates essays? How very on brand. Head to the comments to co-sign our EIC @kristenmiller.bsky.social’s ✨holiday message✨ to the NEA. We’re not going anywhere. #literarycommunity #essay

“Divorce is a writer's business,” Anahid Nersessian writes in our new issue. “You can paint a wedding but not a divorce.” yalereview.org/article/anah...

“A writer’s canonization is a slow slaughter of the real, the wax of the replica hardening until all that shows is mask or mascot.” In our winter issue, Elisa Gonzalez looks beneath Seamus Heaney’s fame.

‘By focusing on how hard or how smart we work, all this talk about productivity is completely missing the point. Productivity is just about where we sit in the global economic system, and doesn’t have all that much to do with your holiday plans.’

THIS. One of my all time favourite movies, Wong Kar-Wai's IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE has a long and famously twisty backstory - originally conceived as a musical rom-com called SUMMER IN BEIJING and ending up going through a string of radical transformations to... well, none of the above.

"He believed that C20th British cultural life was, to a certain extent, a conspiracy in which ordinary people found themselves repeatedly hoodwinked by gate-keeping taste-brokers with a fatal attachment to modernism." RIP Professor John Carey

"Poetry lets me move toward that horizon, even if I can’t reach it." -Billy-Ray Belcourt speaks to Petala Ironcloud about his process, his fascinations, and his new poetry collection https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-opposite-of-the-world/

The NBCC biography longlist!

How a Māori-led space centre is rethinking Aotearoa’s place in the sky

In te reo Māori this would be “E mua kai kai, e muri kai hūare” (“The early ones eat food, the late ones eat spittle”)

Literary editor Steve Braunias has named The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey as best novel of 2025. Kate Camp analyses her genius.

The best of the best book book lists: a round-up from Lithub

Literary editor Steve Braunias has named a social history of the Manapōuri hydro project as the best illustrated book of 2025. The author backgrounds her book.

This one's for the academics: deadline 28 February

Violence begets violence, shooting innocent civilians is abhorrent 😢 Lighting a light for kindness & creativity: ‘The antithesis to Nazi ideology’: how Pippi Longstocking was born to stand up to Hitler - in response to the darkest days of the Second World War. www.theguardian.com/film/2025/de...

It's time as always to recall everybody's favourite Christmas mondegreen: Olive the other reindeer Used to laugh and call him names

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

Check out the December issue! Featuring guests Tony Guo, Helen Rickerby, Ruby Porter and John Fenton, along with the Monica Taylor Poetry Prize winner, Jilly O'Brien. There's also an art essay by Samuel Te Kani, and so much more! We hope you love it 🩵 www.takahe.org.nz/takahe-115/

Announcing the National Book Critics Circle 2025 Longlist for Criticism

@riverheadbooks.bsky.social @groveatlantic.bsky.social @bloomsburybooksus.bsky.social @ndbooks.bsky.social @fsgbooks.bsky.social @angelaflournoy.bsky.social

Speculative fiction journal currently open to submissions from indigenous writers, inviting general submissions in January. There's a link to a list of 'stories we see too often' at the bottom of this page that catalogues things that the editors don't want to see: useful for rookies!