Calum Barnes
@balumcarnes.bsky.social
melancholic resister | words Tribune, The Quietus and 3:AM | beats Shinlifter | keep cool but care sigmaportfolio.substack.com
my hot take on the Emily Wilson review: Christopher Nolan is doing his best to get the general public reading the LRB, and I am grateful.
“Trocchi would barely have encountered Beckett’s work while he was finishing his first novel 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘨 𝘈𝘥𝘢𝘮 but the marks of the Irish writer’s influence on 𝘊𝘢𝘪𝘯’𝘴 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬 are undeniable and even explicit.” —“Situating 𝘊𝘢𝘪𝘯’𝘴 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬”, by @balumcarnes.bsky.social 4/9 bellacaledonia.org.uk/2025/06/19/s...
Situating Cain’s Book
This is adapted from a talk at the Trocchi at 100 event in the Kelvinhall Glasgow organised by the Department of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University and the Andrew Hook Centre for American St…
bellacaledonia.org.uk
quite the double blow for the Scottish government to increase business rates by huge percentages then the council leave Leith businesses without trams running during their busiest trading period
EdinburghMinute.com@edinburghminute.com · last wk.🚧 BREAKING NEWS: This section of Princes Street is expected to remain closed until mid-August. 💊 Boots on Princes Street will be able to re-open from the weekend. 🚎 Bus diversions via Queen St and George St to continue. 🚊 And still no trams to Leith for at least 3 more weeks.
The Odyssey was a pretty contrived adaptation, Dublin was totally unrecognisable??
i was surprised by Christopher Nolan’s casting of Antony Gormley as the cyclops
some gen z dude in the pub complaining that underground artist Jeff Buckley has been ruined by tiktok lmao
me psyching myself up to work in the bookshop knowing full well it’s just going to be another day selling copy after copy of Yesteryear
yer 4th July fireworks displays have nothing on Paisley’s Sma Shot Day where they burn a boss they won more money out of in 1856
it’s reassuring that not even Fredric Jameson has a fucking clue what Heidegger is on about
Post exotic novel No. 49! (with thanks to @uminnpress.bsky.social) For more on the Volodine-verse, see www.3ammagazine.com/3am/pessoa-o... by @balumcarnes.bsky.social and www.the-tls.com/literature/f... by yrs truly
i wrote myself about Scotland’s rich heritage of translating modernist big hitters last year: open.substack.com/pub/sigmapor...
Kelman and His Precursors
On Scotland's invisible conduits of literary modernism.
open.substack.com
hannah@hannahkateboast.bsky.social · 2mo agoInteresting short piece on the Scottish translators Willa and Edwin Muir, who popularised Kafka in the English-speaking world, and who I learnt about only recently, thanks to @balumcarnes.bsky.social.
Interesting short piece on the Scottish translators Willa and Edwin Muir, who popularised Kafka in the English-speaking world, and who I learnt about only recently, thanks to @balumcarnes.bsky.social.
Association for Scottish Literature@asls.org.uk · 2mo ago“The Muirs gave Kafka a distinctive voice in English for half a century: fluent, formal, enigmatic and mesmeric” – but a new, award-winning study of Kafka’s translators has almost completely erased their work from literary history, says Boyd Tonkin engelsbergideas.com/reviews/the-...
found an interview with Laszlo Krasznahorkai where he describes encountering the Burryman
it’s not surprising that Olga Tokarczuk has played with AI given her work has always been engaged with the mystical dimensions of new technologies but more galling that she seems totally blind to the environmental devastation and the labour exploitation it’s founded upon.
fine, i’ll do the 100 novels thing. i haven’t repeated any authors and have started with the early gateway books that shaped me then the rest is a free for all.
i understand these lists are more helpful as provocations and this is by an English language publication but it’s nevertheless pretty miserable that of all 26 novels published after 1970 only four of them are non-anglophone and two of those are by the same author. www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...
The 100 best novels of all time
The top 100 novels of all time published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide. How many have you read?
theguardian.com
I'm Lead Judge of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, awarded at University of Edinburgh since 1919 and due to be announced this month. But the university is currently withholding 100% of my pay for participating in a marking and assessment boycott. So, at present, there will be no prize.
utterly astonished to see an Edinburgh bookshop make a plea for volunteers to perform the same duties as their paid booksellers
some guy has asked me to leave the pub because he believes I’m CIA 😞
Looking forward to speaking to Nina Allan at Argonaut about the new biography about J.G. Ballard written with her late husband, Christopher Priest on May 7th.
when Pynchon writes ‘against the day’ on page 903 of Against the Day
hate it when you end up as an eunuch in the landscape of despair
publishers have really been producing some unhinged merch recently
