Currently, I think my two favorite fiction writers might be Julia Armfield and Martin MacInnes. Both write smart novels that are also page turners—prose suffused with a sense of descriptive unease and imperceptible horrors that feel palpable even when they fail to materialize.

Enjoying a chilled stout and listening to Mark Knopfler’s “The Ragpicker’s Dream” is one of my favorite holiday traditions. Wishing you all peace this season.

I didn’t think the first AI paper I’d find during grading period would be… from a respected, peer-reviewed journal asking me to review a submission. Fucking bleak.

how is Rose Betts the most majestic combo of Imogen Heap and the Decemberists? And how am I only learning about her now? I’m obsessed.

Like my man Zevon says, “If I leave you, it doesn’t mean I love you any less. Keep me in your heart for a while.” We’ll miss you Bon. You were the best cat anyone could ask for.

Colleagues and fellow scholars, here’s info on a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies that I’m coediting with Matthew Gannon and @katemarshall.bsky.social: “Long Modernism, Altered Natures,” cfp below—send us your abstracts! call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/09/...

I love Watertown

My newest piece on Peele’s NOPE and the McManus bros’ THE BLOCK ISLAND SOUND is out in SFF&TV, along with several other banger essays. Check it out here (if you don’t have access, dm me) liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/toc/sfftv/18...

Contents | Science Fiction Film & Television 18, 2

This paper focuses on the TRON duology – Steven Lisberger’s TRON (1982) and Joseph Kosinki’s TRON: Legacy (2010) – ahead of the release of Joachim Rønning’s TRON: Ares (2025) to situate the series in relation to the social dreaming of utopianism. As I’ll ...

liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk

Let’s be real, LLM is just way too similar to MLM.

Sometimes, the way a draft of something gets written is 37 false starts and aborted efforts and then BAM. 7500 words in two days.

The upshot of extractive capitalism is a house of mirrors where what’s below is above, as we’re crushed within centuries by what was buried over epochs.

Nathan K. Hensley@nathankhensley.bsky.social · last yr.

The plan is to blast a 600-foot deep chasm in the earth, inside the floodplain of the San Joaquin River, and to do it without running a single study on what would happen when water inevitably pours into the pit

The frontier is alive and well in the world-ecology.

Nathan K. Hensley@nathankhensley.bsky.social · last yr.

Just another extractive project, at another frontier where cheap nature interfaces w the profit motive against the backdrop of a deliberately hollowed-out & (in this case) fully coopted regulatory apparatus. @nytimes.com @washingtonpost.com, does anybody want to shine a national light on this

My review of Sarah Dimick’s tremendous new book, UNSEASONABLE, is out at ISLE. Academic friends and fellow environmentalists, check out Sarah’s awesome work! academic.oup.com/isle/advance...

Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures. By Sarah Dimick

A deceptively simple question animates Sarah Dimick’s Unseasonable: what do literary and cultural depictions of seasonal regularity (or irregularity) revea

academic.oup.com

Stoked and stacked for IMAGINING CRISIS IN 21C AMERICAN LITERATURE in the fall!

“Set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin during the Great Depression, Shadow Ticket follows Hicks McTaggart, a detective who is tasked with finding the heiress of a cheese fortune.” I mean, that tracks. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...

Thomas Pynchon announces Shadow Ticket, his first novel in more than a decade

The elusive 87-year-old author’s new book is a noir caper set during the big band era following a detective in search of a cheese heiress

theguardian.com

ngl it ain’t easy reading Karen Russell’s THE ANTIDOTE when I feel the urge to write down notes about every. single. page.

I can vouch, this book is 🔥

Stanford University Press@stanfordpress.bsky.social · last yr.

In Cartographies of Empire, Myka Tucker-Abramson draws from an archive of more than 140 global road novels from over twenty countries, challenging dominant conceptions of the road novel as primarily concerned with American experiences and subjectivities. #ReadUP www.sup.org/books/cartog...

ummmmm clipping. dropping a Neuromancer concept album? I will inhale this shit www.clashmusic.com/reviews/clip...

clipping. - Dead Channel Sky | Reviews | Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews

Cyberpunk currently stands as the last great popular vision of the future. Since its emergence in the early 1980s, via novels by the likes of William

clashmusic.com

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 20: Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)

Patrick Whitmarsh@whitmarshphd.bsky.social · 2y ago

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 19: Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (Karen Tei Yamashita)

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 19: Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (Karen Tei Yamashita)

Patrick Whitmarsh@whitmarshphd.bsky.social · 2y ago

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 18: Blindsight (Peter Watts)

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 18: Blindsight (Peter Watts)

Patrick Whitmarsh@whitmarshphd.bsky.social · 2y ago

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 17: Sing, Unburied, Sing (Jesmyn Ward)

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 17: Sing, Unburied, Sing (Jesmyn Ward)

Patrick Whitmarsh@whitmarshphd.bsky.social · 2y ago

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 16: Eleutheria (Allegra Hyde)

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 16: Eleutheria (Allegra Hyde)

Patrick Whitmarsh@whitmarshphd.bsky.social · 2y ago

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 15: Gravity’s Rainbow

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 15: Gravity’s Rainbow

Patrick Whitmarsh@whitmarshphd.bsky.social · 2y ago

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 14: The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula Le Guin)

This. Sucks. C’mon Lions.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 14: The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula Le Guin)

Patrick Whitmarsh@whitmarshphd.bsky.social · 2y ago

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 13: The Names (Don DeLillo)

OK I’m almost done with Jeff VanderMeer’s new Area X novel, Absolution, and why the hell is this final section written as though it’s being narrated by Raoul Duke?

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 13: The Names (Don DeLillo)

Patrick Whitmarsh@whitmarshphd.bsky.social · 2y ago

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 12: Nightwood (Djuna Barnes)

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 12: Nightwood (Djuna Barnes)

Patrick Whitmarsh@whitmarshphd.bsky.social · 2y ago

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 11: Gathering Evidence (Martin MacInnes)

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 11: Gathering Evidence (Martin MacInnes)

Patrick Whitmarsh@whitmarshphd.bsky.social · 2y ago

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Book 10: A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Bill Brown)