LET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx - Victorian novel pastiche with added structural labyrinth and a tangled bloodlines plot to make Jarndyce and Jarndyce bleed from the ears. Enjoyed until exhaustion. #booksky

LET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Louche, bored aristocrats plot and confess sexual escapades in that most secret medium, letters. Fun, until everyone punished or dead or married off or exiled. France, meanwhile, runs out of paper. #booksky #book

AI translation can compress meaning and port it across like a translator: it can’t transport the experience because it experiences nothing. It can’t re-engineer the body’s somatic response to the text because it feels nothing. It can’t communicate the knowing of a text, because it knows fuck all.

LET ME BE BRIEF: Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): E Taylor’s Angel: unlikeable girl grows up into unlikely novelist, marries unpleasant man, reaps all unattractive seeds sowed. Lesson in there somewhere, whether for novelists or for lady novelists, I couldn’t say. #booksky

LET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): E.M. Forster’s Howards End - an umbrella as deus ex machina, how terribly, suitably English. But what a lot of sturm and drang for a house that isn’t even a farm. #booksky #books

The puppy has eaten a paperback. Fitzcarraldo! With flaps! My occasional literary agony aunt column is up on Substack. #booksky #puppy #agonyaunt #dogs #fitzcarraldo open.substack.com/pub/ilonayaz...

My Chernobyl anniversary isn’t April 26. Is the 28th - the day I got locked outside, seventy miles away, and watched the biggest raindrops I’ve ever seen fall from a violet-silver-green cloud that was gone in five minutes. #chernobyl open.substack.com/pub/ilonayaz...

open.substack.com/pub/ilonayaz... I have a Substack: much like early-career Jesus - a few things to say not many followers yet… #translation #culture #reading

Big thanks to Jacqueline Nyathi @hararereview.com for the fab review. I really love it when people enjoy reading the book almost as much as I enjoy translating it.

Dostoyevsky didn’t have to, ffs. (why it’s taken me 25 years to finish a work of fiction - my own, for a change - actually two in three months - ruthless avoidance of my family) #writing #novel

To Pushkin House this week for a two-hander talk about translating indigenous literature from the far north. Still very charmed and not a little weirded out by the idea that kind, interested people would pay to hear me talk about anything. #translation #translator #russian #rustrans

You saw it here.

Delirious is exactly how it often felt to be translating it - in the best possible way.

Huge thanks to @locusmag.bsky.social and Paul Di Filippo for the thoughtful review - and yes, “Courtyard…” really ought to make it over to English readers! Paging @angryrobotbooks.bsky.social

so good I have to post them twice

I was moved and disturbed by Egana Djabbarova’s writing - can’t wait to see the book again in @lizoksbooks.bsky.social translation

Christmas day with my dear, now elderly in-laws. This probably isn’t the saddest cup of coffee in England - dregs of the Nescafe jar, semi-skimmed milk - but pity me all the same. There is a metric ton of cheese in the fridge. I shall be drinking all the port in the house, by and by.

Translating genre is creative: funny things have to be funny, scary things scary. Genre can be ambitious and talk about what people are really preoccupied with - what they desire and dread - doesn’t have to be “austere and unflinching,” etc. @crimereads.bsky.social lithub.com/chilling-lit...

Including her own, natch. You’ll love it, I promise! 😂

I do! I do recommend them, and I recommend my translation of The Village at the Edge of Noon, too. Go buy a book or two! And #dontgointhewoods

Publication day! #dontgointhewoods #booksky #translator

"Valerych roared, and he struck out for the other riverbank - away from the incinerating flame and the village and his dead goddamned wife - toward the other world, the other shore." Published today! Is it terror in the woods? Or the truth? Translated by @missadadoom.bsky.social.

Buyer’s premorse- I haven’t bought it yet, but I fully intend to regret this purchase

A winning combination of ridiculous, hilarious, and adorable.

Thanks @crimereads.bsky.social - happy to be included - don’t go in the woods xx😳 crimereads.com/the-best-fic...

“Whoever wrote this episode should die!” Good actors playing bad actors becoming better people through acting and life. @oliviarutigliano.bsky.social has written the Galaxy Quest paean I’ve longed for: crimereads.com/galaxy-quest/

cosplay cowboys

Calling @aptshadow.bsky.social - am still reeling that he got arachnophobic me to read a whole book about sentient (shudders) spiders. This is the only spider content that shall ever be posted here. Or anywhere. By me.

Saying “Sorry to interrupt,” doesn’t actually give you the right to interrupt. Unless it’s an emergency. Your inability to wait your turn is not an emergency.

If you like folklore, horror and snark (or dying to know how the thrain could meet) get yourself a copy, but be sure to start it before the noonday blaze.

I did a thing.

“I often walk through art galleries, and realise the stuff on the walls would be so much better if I simply stole it and drew penises on it or whatever, and that they wouldn’t have made it publicly viewable if they didn’t want that.” Marina Hyde nails it as usual.

Products individually so worthless that withholding them or paying for them will kill a whole industry? Right, so the golden goose here is artists, not AI…

A public service reminder that AI summary and ChatGPT will confidently tell you nonsense - don’t trust, always verify. Better yet, donate to Wikipedia.

Happy International Translation Day - here’s St Jerome, our patron saint, demonstrating what we look like when, after 20 minutes of parsing active verbs, we confidently go back to “he said”. #translation #internationaltranslationday #translator

Remind me again how I said making eight layers of anything at home is at least four layers too many… #medovik #honeycake

You can have dignity or you can be a freeloader looking to get your balls scratched. #dogsofbluesky #DoodlePie

I know the Romans grew some grapes in Britain, but this is nuts. North London terroir, no pesticides. Climate emergency, something something? #toohot

This is an explanation of how black holes work, at the Nobel Prize Museum. I don’t understand it to such a degree it’s making me physically sick, a little. Enjoy.

I don’t know who discovered the magic of yeast, flour, salt, water and oil - but it’s a strange alchemy, especially if you drop a heap of olives in, midway. #breadsticks #abreadinthehand

Because doing publishing is even more lucrative than doing translation.

I must be following the right people because my feed is full of this sad news. Thank you for the songs - especially when you could have been “making $2000 a year - just teaching.” I hope the pigeons don’t see you coming.

#historicalromance survivors unite

2nd December… maybe don’t head for the woods.

Ten writers by whom I’ve read more than five books Alexandre Dumas Charles Dickens Patrick O’Brian Dorothy Dunnett C J Cherryh Arthur C Clarke Ian Banks Joseph Heller Michael Crichton Georgette Heyer

Just got regretfully kicked out of cafe for reading on my iPad - because “it’s a device, we have a no laptops rule.” I said I wasn’t working, it wasn’t a laptop, I’m just reading… Anyway, here am I, sitting outside, feeling weirdly humiliated and definitely not in the mood to come back. #cafegoals

What is it about labs and lab crosses and their destiny is to end up with arseholes who never feed them… a wicked fate. #summersoup #pelmeni #DoodlePie

When you resigned on moral grounds from your long-term place of employment and you find yourself consumed with an uncharacteristic urge to do ambitious decorating… with gloss paint. At a gazillion quid a tin.

If you’re going to put cards out asking people not to take ip space for hours with their laptops but “reserve this space for conversations,” then stop blasting from every speaker like it’s a stadium. #cafe #laptopfreezone

Wanted to share with you a song perfectly matched to its author, the performer Lucio Rossi. Sadness and joy in equal measure, truly moving. youtu.be/Pxenth9Ru2k?...