Proust

Post by @theimportanceofbeingaloof · 1 image 💬 0  🔁 0  ❤️ 8 · 5 questions with Toby Martinez de las Rivas · 1. Why do you write? I am not sure I can really answer this question without giving a series of platitudes - which I doubt would be v…

INTERVIEWER: What do you have that John Donne didn't have 500 years ago?
TOBY MARTINEZ DE LAS RIVAS: A dead God.

île aux aigrettes, pas loin de mahébourg, île maurice

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSS

out in the UK on 23/4
www.toppingbooks.co.uk/books/ananda...
and in the US on 4/28
www.bookculture.com/book/9780374...

Gordon Lish replies:

“Captain Fiction’s powers? There are seven of them. One is the power to see the heart of the writer through a single word. The other six I forgot.”

Jimmy J & The Petty Grievances

Trump lost this war in every possible sense — morally, legally, politically, economically, reputationally, and strategically.

“It’s wild how both of them are super kind over email and in person… but they turn on tracked changes, and all of a sudden it’s a bloodbath.”

NASA just dropped this image of Artemis II astronaut Christina Koch looking back at us. The first woman to ever see our planet in its entirety. I’m not crying you’re crying 🥹🔭🧪 📸: NASA

Oh my god, when I was reading it ages ago I went and dug up the ebook so I could do a clean screenshot of that exact section! It is so wild to see it referenced in the wild...
(Buy the book, y'all! As this excerpt shows, it is VERY GOOD. books.dramabookshop.com/book/9780399... )

A painted ship upon a painted ocean ~ the sea turns to mercury in this luminous image of a fishing fleet by Californian impressionist William Ritschel (‘Boats Returning Home’ c 1915, Irvine Museum, University of California)

Thesis #17: Translation is the closest form of reading.

Palestinian Man Recounts Brutal Sexual Assault by Israeli Settlers

Palestinian Man Recounts Brutal Sexual Assault by Israeli Settlers www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/w...

The law backing up what everyone who makes stories will tell ya: ideas ain't worth the fig in a newton, the execution of said ideas is all that counts

INTERVIEWER How did the idea for Blindness develop? SARAMAGO As has been the case with all of my novels, Blindness emerged from an idea that suddenly presented itself to my thoughts. (I am not sure this is the most precise formula, but I cannot find a better one.) I was in a restaurant, waiting to be served lunch, when suddenly, without any warning, I thought, What if we were all blind? As if answering my own question, I thought, But we really are blind. This was the embryo of the novel. Afterward, I only had to conceive the initial circumstances and allow the consequences to be born. They are horrific consequences, but they have a logic of steel. There is not much imagination in Blindness, just the systematic application of the relation of cause and effect. INTERVIEWER I liked Blindness very much, but it is not an easy read. It is a hard book. The translation is very good. SARAMAGO Did you know that Giovanni Portiero, my longtime English translator, died? INTERVIEWER When? SARAMAGO In February. He died of AIDS. He was translating Blindness, which he finished, when he died. Toward the end, he himself started to go blind as a result of the medication his doctors gave him. He had to choose between taking the medication, which would sustain him for a bit longer, and not taking it, which would create other risks. He chose, shall we say, to preserve his vision, and he was translating a novel about blindness. It was a devastating situation.

Some further context on that, from Saramago’s Paris Review interview:

"On the road, they stopped for some coffee. Got out of the car and felt the hot, bracing desert air in their throat as a fact and I everywhere above them, everywhere, as if there were no more borders, no more barriers, just an earth as unbounded as the heavens..."

Great thread from @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social in the replies here.

Super touched to receive the physical Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize certificate in the mail… should I get it framed??

Allez les méduses !!! 🪼🪼🪼

some of you are looksmaxxing when you need to be booksmaxxing

Steller's Sea Cow. © Leonhard Stejneger (1851–1943)

FWIW, newspaper book review sections are part of the mission of journalism. Every year, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry titles tell us something we didn't know before, or advance the craft of verse and prose in new ways. This is the purpose of reviews: to alert us to the shaping of our culture.

We are proud to unveil the world’s longest underwater timelapse, starting May 1st 2023 and running 1,000 days through January 28, 2026. This 10fps period covers summer 2023’s coral bleaching mortality event, but then recovering and growing through ‘24 & ‘25 into ‘26 #coralcitycamera

A Day for Gaza Today, The Nation is turning over its website exclusively to stories from Gaza and its people. This is why.

Media coverage of Gaza has plummeted. So today on @thenation.com, we're doing something pretty special: we're only running pieces by people in and from Gaza.

We're calling it "A Day for Gaza." You can find links to all of the incredible pieces here. Please read! www.thenation.com/article/worl...

"The day is like wide water, without sound..."
Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning" in HARMONIUM (1923)

How the Louvre’s Stolen Jewels Turned Up at Paris Couture Week, Courtesy of Schiaparelli Schiaparelli designer Daniel Roseberry welcomes Vanity Fair into a fitting ahead of his Paris Haute Couture Week show. “We haven’t shown anything like this in a long time,” he says, “but it was time t...

“What does anger look like when it’s used for beauty?” www.vanityfair.com/style/story/...

The Grey King, honestly… he opening page is etched in my memory!

oh no, are publishers getting squeamish about buying queer books right now for some impossible-to-guess reason??

sounds like our books need to get even more queer, relentlessly queer, battle-axe queer, cackling queer

Wind and water raged with storms,
Wave and shingle were shackled on ice
Until another year appeared in the yard

– Beowulf, tr. Heaney

I think about this quote from the Luddite movement all the time