#RachelCuskTogether - “It was simply a desire to escape from what I had. The thread led nowhere, except into ever expanding wastes of anonymity. I could swim out into the sea as far as I liked, if what I wanted was to drown” She wants to be seen so puts herself in danger? Wastes of anonymity!

#APSTogether - This October - another guided read by the brilliant and sensitive Yiyun Li - Charles Dickens' Bleak House apstogether.substack.com/p/bleak-hous...

#RachelCuskTogether - Have any of you read this year's Nobel prize winner? I have not. Yet. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/b...

#RachelCuskTogether A small bomb goes off right here. Why does she engage, take on a stranger? “I remained dissatisfied by the story of his second marriage. It had lacked objectivity; it relied too heavily on extremes, and the moral properties it ascribed to those extremes were often incorrect”

#RachelCuskTogether - Her Paris Review interview. www.theparisreview.org/interviews/7...

#Rachelcusktogether This book is relentlessly descriptive, and tense. “Normally one is safe until much later. It can be very unpleasant if you aren’t used to it.”

#rachelcusktogether Thinking about how people don’t talk to each on planes anymore.

#anthonypowelltogether My SIL - Malcolm's sister - died in her sleep on Saturday morning and I left quickly for New Orleans, but I'm looking forward to reading your comments about the ending of this epic read. We did it. Thank you all for your smart and great company on another slow read.

This brief and moving piece, by Patrick Bringley, about a painting by Bruegel the Elder made my day. (Bringley wrote a whole book that I may just have to read.) www.metmuseum.org/perspectives...

It would only be fair if Madame Bovary’s daughter Berthe became a writer. Poor kid. #Flauberttogether

Remembering Count Basie on his birthday 🎂 📷 Paul Natkin, Chicago, 1978 "Basie as pianist remains the elliptical master: He plays a sentence, but conveys a paragraph." - Leonard Feather From 1965, "All of Me" youtube.com/watch?v=JB2X...

I've set out to do this before. Gonna try again, with the Italian version close by. It begins August 25th. 100daysofdante.com?fbclid=PAZXh...

#Flauberttogether I can feel Flaubert’s pleasure in the writing of Chap 8 as he crosscuts unspoken lust and a diatribe on the virtues of manure.

#Flauberttogether www.theparisreview.org/letters-essa...

i highly rec the Flaubert-Turgenev correspondence. A lot of fun/insight. #flauberttogether

They want bookclub stories? We've got them for days! #anthonypowelltogether thebookerprizes.substack.com/p/wed-like-t...

#anthonypowelltogether - A side book over at APS - The Lover - Marguerite Duras - with Honor Moore. Begins June 11. A welcome second read for me. substack.com/home/post/p-...

Speed & precision! "His wife, a Canadian, had died about ten years before, and, while Borrit marketed fruit in Europe, their children preferred to live with grandparents in Canada. His own relations with the opposite sex took an exclusively commercial form." #anthonypowelltogether

This book opens with Nick being fitted into a handsomely tailored coat which sends me back to the opening image I keep of Widmerpool in the wrong coat at school, being shamed. #anthonypowelltogether

#anthonypowelltogether Nick’s scene with Isobel is a smart conversation with no touching, no intimacy. Even after not seeing each other for months. I know she’s pregnant, but c’mon. Didn’t seeing her melt him a little?

#anthonypowelltogether A brief interruption to let you know that A Public Space is reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey at Substack. My first ABOUT time reading. Begins Feb. 5th.

#anthonypowelltogether Jean DuPont is almost as ubiquitous as Widmerpool. Did AP write her in to torment Nick?

I'm so sad for New Orleans, my city. Walking in circles as information trickles in.

What a glorious read, and a much needed reason to get some distance from what's happening on earth. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Our BBC Radio 4 production of Samantha Harvey’s @thebookerprizes.bsky.social winning #Orbital is being repeated 1.45pm Mon-Fri & available as a boxset on BBC Sounds. Read by Anneika Rose, abridged by Sara Davies & produced by Mary Ward-Lowery & @mair.bsky.social #books www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Today's #WaferThinBook: Famous Fathers & Other Stories by Pia Z. Ehrhardt (2007, 166p.) "Yet why not say what happened?" This line from Robert Lowell opens and captures the spirit of this collection. Ehrhardt writes about recognizable people and families in all their failures and good intentions.

True? “Peace of mind comes when there is a balance between the inner and the outer, when the inner flows freely and unhindered into the outer, and vice versa.” #Knausgaardtogethertheseasons

@christina500.bsky.social an archive for our Virginia Woolf readers - www.woolfartsarchive.org - not sure how to find our treasured group of readers.

The grey, flickering sequences of the screen showed with increased persistence close-ups of stocky demagogues, fuming, gesticulating, stamping; oceans of raised forearms; steel-helmeted men tramping in column; armoured vehicles rumbling over the pavé of broad boulevards. #anthonypowelltogether

An essay I wrote about a mother and father owl who fell into my backyard. oxfordamerican.org/magazine/iss... #knausgaardtogethertheseasons

I miss my Twit Lit people and will try harder to be here instead of there. Working on a book - and the wack episodic cabinet news - has me more absent minded than usual. Thank you for the mercy of the catch up days, Mike!