“Saying I is also a form of experiment” The sublime Lisa Robertson talking about what’s my book of the year so far.

minor literature[s]@minorliteratures.bsky.social · 6mo ago

"subjectivity or self-aware consciousness is not an attribute I would attach to a river [...] one way to imagine the life of the river is to consider the multiplicity of lives concentrated in this moving, directional form ..." — Lisa Robertson on RIVERWORK minorliteratures.com/2026/05/14/p...

It’s 50 years since Renata Adler’s incomparable novel ‘Speedboat’ was published: illuminative and dangerous as a lightning strike, bitingly funny, caustically insightful and marvellously stylish. Pub in US @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social, just reissued @wnbooks.bsky.social with intro by Hilton Als.

"Well, Genet had a phrase that I repeat often: ‘Difficulty is an author’s respect for the reader’, or rather, making him or her think, collaborate – the work is incomplete without the reader’s input…" - Juan Goytisolo

16, attempting to hitchhike to Maine, standing on the shoulder of a highway onramp near Albany, with night coming on and 3 dollars in my pocket, when a guy in a white Ford Pinto rolls up and hands me $60 and a King James Bible. "Thanks man you saved my ass" I said. "No, God saved your ass," he said.

Nome@nome.bsky.social · 7mo ago

What's a moment from your life, out of context, that's straight from a movie? I'll start - in Tokyo, looking for a quiet place to eat lunch, I sat down in a graveyard. The biggest goddamn raven I've ever seen in my goddamn life landed on a stone next to me. At her insistence, I shared.

Well this is pretty much as insane as I expected it to be.

5 years of Socrates on the Beach... McElroy, Gass, Tudor-Sideri, Musil, Grill, Ariel Porte, Moore, Ulven, Blackwell, Craig, Theroux, Sims, Valéry, Stefanescu, Wood, Cărtărescu, Lutz, Hall, Haskell, Nutt, Ryder, Cárdenas, Khi Nao, Olsen, Handke, DeForest... socratesonthebeach.com

Our editor (in a silly hat) talks about her latest book (Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other from @coffeehousepress.bsky.social) and being a Dorothy fangirl at @cincinnatireview.bsky.social . . . www.cincinnatireview.com/interviews/a...

An Interview with Danielle Dutton - The Cincinnati Review

Danielle Dutton’s Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is a collection of surreal stories full of haunted landscapes, literary experiments, and essays on the

cincinnatireview.com

Renata Adler, bringing the goods in PITCH DARK. Extraordinary passage, extraordinary novel.

Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates melancholy from happiness. -- Woolf, Orlando

"Representing the canon that scholars of Asian American literature have built, it is the most expansive dataset to date on Asian American literature." Data and essay: doi.org/10.18737/092...

The Canon of Asian American Literature – Post45 Data Collective

This dataset traces the Asian American literary canon through nearly 1,900 scholarly citations from 1971 to 2023, capturing which authors and texts have shaped the field over time.

doi.org

The thing people who are terrified don’t understand about cities is that all you need to know is what is your business and what is not your business

Ah, the sour smell of fallen, trampled fruit fermenting on city sidewalks. It's one of my favorite smells of the year. Fills me with a great inner peace. We are nearing the end of the torrid heat.

Sitting in my office, starving, receiving updates from daycare that my daughter is being fed "sun butter and jelly sandwich, green beans and fruit cocktail"

Great new review of Jen Craig's Wall up over @greggerkesocrates.bsky.social's Socrates: "Her novels are at once obsessive attempts to give a full account of grief-laden lives, & a demonstration of the impossibility, the ridiculousness, even, of such a pursuit" socratesonthebeach.com/gus-oconnor-...

Gus O'Connor on Jen Craig — Socrates on the Beach

socratesonthebeach.com

Found the hand-drawn cocktail book that my wife and I made during our drunken shut-in covid days.

Got a lil bagatelle at beloved @hexliterary.bsky.social

hex@hexliterary.bsky.social · last yr.

"The cat stretched in the sunlight and talked to us, eyes narrowed, while Marco demonstrated the library machines." Incredible restraint, a sense of mystery that lingers, a lazing library cat! @addisonzeller.bsky.social is back in hex with an absolute wonder that we can't stop thinking about! Go! 🐈‍⬛

Sunday morning writing mantra, via DeLillo, from inside my cocoon of dimmed lights, closed doors, and noise-cancelling headphones: "A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it."

say it again: 4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

Anise K. Strong@anisekstrong.bsky.social · last yr.

It's important to note here that we're not just talking about faculty & university staff. 100s of U.S. colleges are in towns or small cities where they form the major industry & lifeblood of the community. Loss of students -> loss of rent $, restaurant $, bars, bookstores, gaming stores...

I believe these are the first four academic books to cite an episode of American Vandal, which, like, there will be prizes.

Wrote 1000 words on Gabriel Blackwell's DOOM TOWN, a strange and deeply affecting novel that I won't soon forget.

On Gabriel Blackwell's Doom Town

I’m generally not a superstitious person, but there have been times in my life when catastrophes have piled up with such alarming speed and synchronicity, that I've been inclined to believe that the u...

substack.com

We're excited to start off our featured author posts with Elvis Bego's work "A Part"! Check out the rest of his work on our website (link in bio) in our Summer 2025 Issue out now!

I've been reading Trieste by Dasa Drndic for the last few days and it has absolutely wiped me out. Reading it next to Celan, Pound, etc., and my head is spinning. What a work of fiction - as well as a historical and documentary indictment of the world that reads it.

Happy Bloomsday to all who celebrate

New work in @havehashad.com today! Another cheesy little dad piece that might be the cheesiest little dad piece I’ve written yet (while also maybe the one I had the most fun with?)

HAD@havehashad.com · last yr.

our first "square" is a banger from Adam Shaw! "And I do this again and again, again and again until I finish my last pass and a raindrop hits my hand and a few more hit the grass and I smell how sweet it is, really, the work and monotony of it all..." https://www.havehashad.com/kk41b

My 17 month old daughter has developed an allergy to mosquitos and I'm frankly annoyed that no one, from my wife to our pediatrician to her daycare providers, seems to want to use the official name for it.

“I don’t want to overstate the case, but what’s at stake is life and death”: An Interview with Ben Libman (@benlibman.bsky.social) —Cristina Politano (@monalisavitti.bsky.social) minorliteratures.com/2025/05/29/i...

“I don’t want to overstate the case, but what’s at stake is life and death”: An Interview with Ben Libman — Cristina Politano

Ben Libman is a Paris-based Canadian writer who has mined the geographical specifics of his family’s history, from Nazi-occupied Austria to post-war Canada, in order to challenge the creation…

minorliteratures.com

This is my ego as a novice lit mag editor talking, but I imagine someone, somewhere will benefit from reading this entire issue whole, preferably in order of presentation. yourimpossiblevoice.com/issue32/

Your Impossible Voice #32 | Spring 2025

Featuring new work from Vincenzo della Malva, Molara Wood, Khalil AbuSharekh, Ian MacClayn, Karen An-hwei Lee, Austin Adams, Eric T. Racher, Mary Burger, Jerry Thompson, Shawna Yang Ryan, Steve Barbar...

yourimpossiblevoice.com

Alvin Lu@alvinlu.bsky.social · last yr.

Lucky to guest-edit prose for this issue oF YIV. Thanks to everyone who sent in work and to those whose work I chose. There's prizewinners and first-time fictioneers and more than a little of the ondoorgrondelijk, from Africa to Oakland. Thank you to Keith, Karen, and Stephen for having me.

Off here for now, but here’s a photo from today’s writing: Virginia Woolf’s bedroom at Monk’s House, from a 2023 visit. The fireplace features a painting by her sister Vanessa Bell of Godrevy Lighthouse in Cornwall, where they visited as children, and said to be an inspiration for To The Lighthouse.

Everything about this is a tragedy, every level, from cheated freelancers to authors obscured to readers who don’t get served either.

Rachael King@rachaelking70.bsky.social · last yr.

This was just posted by @tbretc.bsky.social on another platform. The Chicago Sun-Times obviously gets ChatGPT to write a ‘summer reads’ feature almost entirely made up of real authors but completely fake books. What are we coming to?

Took the Substack plunge (yes, sorry, I know) and wrote a little thing about Redbud trees.

In Praise of the Redbud Tree

I have no name for them, the informal parks that sit in the middle of the residential blocks of my city.

substack.com