Faculty Hilary Plum's latest novel, "State Champ," out from @bloomsburybooksus.bsky.social, was named in the @parisreview.bsky.social's "Our Favorite Books of 2025" list (selected by @markleidner.bsky.social) 🏆🏃‍♀️🩸 Full list: www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/12...

@parisreview.bsky.social includes STATE CHAMP in its list of "Our Favorite Books of 2025!" "Hilary Plum's novel has a pulpy, political premise that is complemented by an arresting structure and complex characterization." -- @markleidner.bsky.social www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/12...

dreamt the last level of jedi training was firing up your lightsaber in the shower and having to block every single droplet of water

It’s fucked up that in the Book of Job, the main character is made to suffer endlessly through no fault of his own, and his name is spelled the same as the thing you have to do for money 2,000 years later.

We need a massive New Deal-esque spending program to redirect all the rivers within the United States to flow along contiguous state borders—so that a map of the United States would look like a jigsaw puzzle of states, with rivers being the seams between the pieces.

(to the tune of eleanor rigby) eleanor rigby

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" should’ve been titled “Thirteen Ways of Being Looked at by a Person When You Are a Blackbird” to center the blackbird’s POV even though the poem is from the POV of people.

Whenever I eat my breakfast, I pretend like there are hidden cameras all around me, and it’s up to me to just act natural and eat because some visionary Hollywood studio executive has greenlit a movie with the craziest pitch of all time: What if some random guy ate his breakfast?

no context drunk on eggnog thought: fjords are the stealth archers of landforms

They’re booming Margaritaville at the Christmas tree farm.

terraformed a local river just in time for thanksgiving. now it runs through my yard, powering a mill wheel connected to a pump to keep my 30ft thanksgiving-themed nintendo and peanuts inflatables fully inflated without having to pay the power company a dime

my agent loves the opening of my post-apocalyptic "potpunk" western, featuring a 3-page description of rugged, sweat-stained cowboys chewing marijuana like tobacco in a dusty saloon, but she remains unconvinced by the main plot, about a marijuana famine where nobody can get high

they should sell capri suns in 20 oz. containers. these little foil pouch thingies don’t have enough in them

simply directing beautiful films in order to curry favor with my cinephile dictator

Benvolio just keeps striving to preserve peace in Verona while also never backing down when prompted to defend Montague honor. Exemplary NPC behavior.

i think they should make the giant halloween yard skeletons taller. i don't think they're tall enough yet. they should make them taller & taller & taller, until they reach the moon & i can climb up on one & get the hell off this accurséd place

about to hurl a stone discus at an invisible “wall” that only I believe is there. shattering reality itself. and proving a realer reality lies beyond this shell of one that we merely need to throw a discus through to see *hurls discus* *it sails through the sky unimpeded*

Yorgos Lanthimos, hit me up. I met a guy on the bus last night with a great idea for a movie. I got his number and am texting him now to see if he remembers telling me about it. We both think you'd be perfect for the material.

Noir novels are usually the best genre fiction to read because the payoff of the story isn’t about who did it as much as it is about the tight construction of story which often rewards attention to detail and is thrilling because you can see the fates of the characters before they do.

Poem

Ladies and gentlemen, after the bride and groom have their first dance to "Streets of Philadelphia", we will have a daddy-daughter dance with the bride and her father to "Streets of Philadelphia". Afterward, please join us on the dance floor for four hours of "Streets of Philadelphia".

Arriving at the poetry reading wearing chain mail made of interlocked mini pretzels, a helmet hollowed out of olive ciabatta, and wielding a rosemary and sea salt encrusted baguette like a legendary sword. Telling the people in attendance to address me as “Sir Bread” or they will be dispatched.

cry havoc and let slip the frogs of war

simply mining less coal to curry favor with my coal-hating wife

🙃

Waiting for notes from my agent like

39. Is the writing part of the self a separate self that can lead the non-writing part of the self into a higher.. more resilient echelon of selfhood? 40. Even if that is possible, is anyone who even asks such questions too neurotic to ever participate in that type of transformation? 🫠

Had me in the first half. "Will publishing this story make anyone other than me feel anything other than my own urge to have written it?" "Is this ... my clumsy attempt at confronting myself with myself in the vain hope that I will be reborn as a new self?" Gets better and hurts more as you go.

This is really funny in like a hurtful kind of way

instantly 100x your short story writing prowess by asking yourself these 50 questions every time you write a short story joylandpublishing.com/fiction/50-q...

Garri Saganenko

I wrote about being very good at something very hard to do, which is also very wrong to do: stealing what people smell like. open.substack.com/pub/markleid...

Love it when the ragtag group of survivors I’m in reaches a place of apparent safety and we drop our guard, laughing a little too loud, sleeping a little too soundly, as we enjoy the fleeting, simple pleasures of a world now lost.

bro last night we lived in a beautiful old farmhouse that got featured in a regional magazine

Can't early humans and megafauna just get along

Boycotting Mario Kart until Nintendo lets us race God against the devil.

Damn dude. Last night we really captured the hard, amoral emptiness of the age.

my new book YOU MUST UNDERSTAND THIS IF YOU WANT TO LIVE is out now. it has 45 short stories, including some of my favourites from the last four years of INFINITE GOSSIP, and unreleased ones. buy it from maxlavergne.square.site

two of my favourite current writers, @markleidner.bsky.social and max easton, hit me with that good blurb. and you can trust them

From @markleidner.bsky.social

Mark Leidner @markleidner.bsky.social @fonografeditions.bsky.social

The next eleven James Bond films should be one Ocean’s Eleven actor at a time.

Taking a mission trip to the foreign country of Target to see if the people who live there want my Christian dollars and loving attitude in exchange for their heathen merchandise.

I love it when something named Paramount merges with something named Skydance.

I read the new novel STATE CHAMP and interviewed its author Hilary Plum. The book is about a washed-up track star who protests the rollback of abortion rights by going on a hunger strike. It has a good plot. open.substack.com/pub/markleid...

“A mordant and morbid narrative of post–Roe v. Wade America…The distressing tale is buoyed by Angela’s incisive narration and frank humor…Readers won’t want to put this down.” Read Publishers Weekly's full review of STATE CHAMP by Hilary Plum here: www.publishersweekly.com/9781639735433

I read the new novel STATE CHAMP and interviewed its author Hilary Plum. The book is about a washed-up track star who protests the rollback of abortion rights by going on a hunger strike. It has a good plot. open.substack.com/pub/markleid...

Some of y’all are out here playing quidditch while Hogwarts burns.

I hate when I'm speed-eating cereal, hunched directly over the bowl for max efficiency, and while opening my mouth to shovel in a new spoonful, some unswallowed bits from the previous bite fall out of my mouth into the bowl, causing droplets of milk to splash into my eyes, momentarily blinding me.