In Brian Dillon’s bewitching new book, “Ambivalence: An Education,” the author’s younger self is depicted as an inscrutable, fumbling figure named B. www.newyorker.com/books/under-...
Can You Write a Memoir in the Third Person?
In Brian Dillon’s bewitching new book, “Ambivalence: An Education,” the author’s younger self is depicted as an inscrutable, fumbling figure named B.
newyorker.com
"In my mind, this is my version of a Vertigo comic from the 1990s." Dash Shaw speaking with Chris Burkhalter on his new book, Like Swimmers, for @publisherswkly.bsky.social. Dash will be at Life World tonight with Frog Farm. Doors at 7pm.
Dash Shaw Channels Covid Losses in ‘Like Swimmers’
The writer and artist explains how his new graphic novel (New York Review Comics, out now) was inspired by losing friends in the pandemic and memories of 1990s-era Vertigo comics.
publishersweekly.com
"I think I believed—maybe I still believe—that the kind of theoretical writing or criticism that I was interested in would somehow poetically, in a way, in itself change the world." Brian Dillon speaking with Tia Glista at Toronto Review. Dillon's new book, Ambivalence, is out in the US today.
Tia Glista and Brian Dillon in conversation | Toronto Review
Reviews editor Tia Glista interviews critic Brian Dillon about his new work of life-writing, 'Ambivalence,' an affect he describes as like “equivocation, paradox,” and androgyny, “which would render t...
thetorontoreview.ca
"Reading Grossman's dispatches alongside a slew of new books written about the war in Ukraine, I found myself wondering: What lessons might Grossman hold for the modern war reporter?" Excellent article about war correspondents past & present, anchored by Vasily Grossman's From the Front Lines.
The Dial@thedialmag.bsky.social · 2d agoWriters confront a series of choices when documenting war. Should they focus on the hard facts or detail its psychological effects? Report from border crossings or combat zones? Perhaps, @nickholdstock.bsky.social posits, “the best war reporter is not a war reporter at all.”
Lockwood has been reading Tove Jansson AND Anakana Schofield's Library of Brothel.
The Observer@theobserveruk.bsky.social · 3d agoPatricia Lockwood: ‘I attempted to access my cat on the astral plane’ ✍️ Patricia Lockwood https://bit.ly/3UCNGeg
"The Death of a Greek Lover seems most successful when it merely celebrates, with its indelible imagery, 'two young men in love,/ On our way to Athens.'" David Plante's Death of a Greek Lover in The Gay & Lesbian Review. It's a beautiful collection of poems. Pick it up.
Odes of Remembrance - The Gay & Lesbian Review
glreview.org
The next To a Green Thought Book Club pick is Gwendoline Riley’s Booker-longlisted The Palm House. We’ll be meeting via Zoom on October 18th at 3pm ET to talk about it. Open to all Founding Members of the newsletter. Subscribe at the link: garthgreenwell.substack.com/subscribe
Dash Shaw (Like Swimmers) & Jesse Moynihan (Forming) will be signing/launching their new books this Thursday (7pm) at Desert Island in Brooklyn. Come celebrate two of the best graphic novels of the year.
Dash Shaw, Jesse Moynihan, Kate Costello, Hotel Art Thief, Jenny Vu at Frog Farm (563 Johnson Ave., BK) next Wednesday 7pm. Comics, animation, more. Books on sale.
frogfarm13
frogfarm.online
"Reissued work is sometimes overpraised, out of an urge to embrace a great artist who went out on the tide of obscurity. And so it’s exciting and alarming to discover how worthy [Nancy] Lemann’s work is of reclamation: her crackling humor, her sharp and soulful observations of character."
Nancy Lemann’s Wasted Youths
The New Orleans writer’s career has been refreshingly unproductive. She writes the only way she knows how: comic, intuitive, frustrating.
newrepublic.com
New #podcast! #DashShaw returns to the show to talk about his fantastic new book, LIKE SWIMMERS, from @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social! We get into #comics, #art, #RoyLichtenstein, #storytelling, #COVID, #RichmondVA, & more, so GO LISTEN: chimeraobscura.com/vm/episode-6...
Episode 689 – Dash Shaw
Virtual Memories Show 689: Dash Shaw “Something not being placeable sticks with me a lot longer, and I think about it a lot more.” With his new book, LIKE SWIMMERS (New York Review Comi…
chimeraobscura.com
I'm in London, UK til Saturday afternoon, if anyone wants to interview me about my new novel LIBRARY OF BROTHEL out Jan 12, 2027 from @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social and in Dublin next week, then NYC .. Drop me a line 22seriousladies@gmail.com or my UK publicist God knows I've plenty things to say.
I wrote about John Berger for @thetls.bsky.social www.the-tls.com/literature-b... @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social
G.- force
In 1953, John Berger asserted: “All works of art within their immediate context are bound directly or indirectly to be weapons: only after a considerable passage of time, when the context has changed,...
the-tls.com
"She was Venus come down from Mount Olympus." Virginia Verasis, Countess of Castiglione, the Victorian beauty who seduced Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte to get France on the side of Italian independence, is the subject of a brilliant new biography by Benedetta Craveri. @litreview.bsky.social.
Jonathan Keates - Fixer from Florence
Jonathan Keates: Fixer from Florence - La Contessa by Benedetta Craveri (Translated from Italian by Alex Andriesse)
literaryreview.co.uk
Big day in NYRB HQ, Diane Williams's new collection, I Liked Rex, is out. If you haven't read her work: it is made up of tiny, coruscating tales which are among the most tender, funny, peculiar, and searching works in all of contemporary literature.
Bulgarians in translation month— Bela Shayevich on Iana Boukova’s Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow; Ari Larissa Heinrich and Qiu Miaojin; and other puzzles.
n+1@nplusonemag.com · last wk.A serendipitous proliferation of Bulgarians, “Women” “in” translation, queer Taiwanese literature, and Optatian with a Balkan twist—Bela Shayevich is back with Miss Translation column 4: www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...
“These books are old, but not classics; to read them is illuminating, but not credentialing.” In n+1’s brand-new issue, just out today: the Editors on reissue publishing. www.nplusonemag.com/issue-54/the...
Old Directions | The Editors
It can feel like listening to Spotify, reading this way. A patchy sampling, in which huge expanses of history are available but unintuitively organized, likely to result in having heard rarities and m...
nplusonemag.com
Bill Littlefield on "I Liked Rex" by Diane Williams (@nyrb-imprints.bsky.social); These micro-fictions can feel slight, funny, or confounding—but their strange imagery and off-kilter observations occasionally land with surprising force. artsfuse.org/332808/book-...
"Trigger Warning. Not for the fainthearted." Margaret Atwood was traumatized by Cuzio Malaparte's Kaputt when she read it as a young teen. Recommends it in her recent Substack, though notes it is difficult to categorize.
Odd Duck Book Reccos #1
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s... what??
margaretatwood.substack.com
Tom McCarthy is on the cover of @publisherswkly.bsky.social's Independent Publishing issue. McCarthy's new book is The Rhyl Poster (out 10/6): "[A] John le Carré–esque setup provides the framework for a hypnotic account of the opaque networks and institutions shaping modern life." We love it.
Just recorded a fun conversation with #DashShaw around his new graphic novel from @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social, LIKE SWIMMERS. That'll post this week, but go order Dash's book now! www.nyrb.com/products/lik...
Like Swimmers
A murder mystery set in pandemic-era Virginia, where a young web designer attempts to uncover who shot and killed her brother—and why the murderer decided to use a silver bullet, from the author of ‘B...
nyrb.com
"In 2010, in a blurb for BodyWorld, David Mazzucchelli described Dash Shaw as 'the future of comics.' With the release of Like Swimmers, his latest graphic novel from NYR Comics, that 'future' is now." hell yeah. Like Swimmers is the graphic novel of the year. @comicsjournal.bsky.social
Like Swimmers - The Comics Journal
Like Swimmers (NYRC, 2026) by Dash Shaw, reviewed by Marc Sobel.
tcj.com
"As other critics have noted, her work is undeniably strange." Well, yes. A review of Rosalind Belben's Is Beauty Good. "[S]he refuses to censor her imagination, her exacting fiction, in order to protect readers from her experience of life, in all its ugliness and all its glory."
Is Beauty Good by Rosalind Belben review – the literary equivalent of free jazz
Combining hilarious detail with harsh observation, this rediscovered novel takes the reader on an exhilaratingly strange journey
theguardian.com
Merve Emre on the brilliant “miniaturism” of Diane Williams and the new collection I Liked Rex
‘Let Us Fall for Whatever We Want To’ | Merve Emre
“I Liked Rex”: this is the title of the title story in Diane Williams’s new collection. These three words, subject, verb, and object, form a complete
nybooks.com
"From this ground, her stories rise like so many private chapels, small, secretive, poised, and richly ornamented. Their architecture, her style, is their singular achievement." —Merve Emre on Diane Williams's new collection, I Liked Rex, out next week.
‘Let Us Fall for Whatever We Want To’ | Merve Emre
“I Liked Rex”: this is the title of the title story in Diane Williams’s new collection. These three words, subject, verb, and object, form a complete
nybooks.com
Mabel and Madeleine read Arthur Schnitzler's Late Fame, watch Kent Jones's movie, and discuss both on the Mandylion podcast for all literature (and things) 18th century.
1-800-Late Fame
Madeline & Mabel read a book AND see a movie!
mandylion.substack.com
It's Book Review Wednesday! The immaculate All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski on @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social elevates the boring and humanizes the bleak. Check out the full review at my blog and please subscribe. dryvetyme.online/2026/08/26/a...
All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski
Set in winter 1945, All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski writes about the mundane details of a minor German aristocratic family.
dryvetyme.online
"The Children of Light is a galaxy-spanning space opera that charts the troubles of the Zors.... Not that its author would agree that this is a moral fable, or even a fabulation in any sense." —Séamas O'Reilly on the best graphic novels of 2026.
"In birth I equal them. In beauty I surpass them. In spirit I judge them." —The motto of Contessa di Castiglione, whose biography by Benedetta Craveri comes out soon. Great review in @ocreviewofbooks.bsky.social
The Contessa by Benedetta Craveri
Reviewed by Eric Byrd
ocreviewofbooks.org
“I like that Benedetta Craveri’s new biography of the Contessa di Castiglione focuses on her political life and epistolary art, because her famous photographs are boring.” Eric Byrd reviews THE CONTESSA from @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social. ocreviewofbooks.substack.com/p/the-contes...
The Contessa by Benedetta Craveri
Reviewed by Eric Byrd
ocreviewofbooks.substack.com