this April 21, read Coviello (+get the book from U Chicago Press!)
"PRINCE is hard to grieve because he is, in an only barely not literal sense, divine...our greatest conceptualist of religion, most devoted not only to God but to heterodoxy, heresy, blasphemy"
lareviewofbooks.org/article/is-t...
Excited to welcome @annakornbluh.bsky.social, Sianne Ngai, and @ryanrkerr.bsky.social to the CTRG annual conference!
this is awful for many reasons, but IHE's framing suggests a frictionless market for academic labor where tenured faculty who dislike the terms of their job can leave for "bluer pastures" anytime. This recodes a functionally collapsed market for humanistic expertise in terms of free market fantasy
Louis Menand on Elisa Tamarkin's Done in Day. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo... @uchicagopress.bsky.social @ucberkeleyenglish.bsky.social
A new book from After Oil drops this fall. I had the great luck to write the chapter on "fuckedness" (that's three syllables) with some other awesome After Oilers. www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/978...
who up anti-bedtime-leftist-ing?
perhaps you'd take pleasure in this newly online tryst of psychoanalysis, genre theory, and the romance boom? www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/lov...
🚨: My new monograph ARRESTING ECOLOGIES: GLOBAL LITERATURE ACROSS AIR, LAND, and SEA, 1926-2014 is available for preorder from OXFORD UP, with 30 percent discount.
if you want to preorder this bad boy & set some of its very, very good essays on your fall syllabi, you can use NUP2026 to get 25% off —and I bet some of us would love to Zoom into your classes to talk?! 💗
@devingarofalo.bsky.social @nupress.bsky.social
Abstracts are due today for POETRY'S PROGRAM ERA INSTITUTIONS--a seminar at ASAP/17 in Madison this October. A heavy line-up is shaping up--join us! @asapartsnow.bsky.social
Sad to hear of the passing of Pearl Fryar. I got to shake his hand once at his topiary garden in Bishopville and I don't think I've ever been more starstruck. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/a...
The couple in this week's Guardian Blind Dates didn't work out but Jack sounds *perfect* for my sister.
She's a vegan geography teacher who lives just outside Manchester, spends a lot of time outdoors, & is basically his age.
Can the internet do its thing?!
www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...
Congrats to my old friend Aadam Jacobs, deservingly receiving international recognition from numerous press sites for creating probably the most important live music archive of the past 30 years, simply by being Aadam.
a guy in Chicago recorded 10,000 live shows, cleaned up the audio, and posted them on IA. pretty neat! listening to 1989 Nirvana now
archive.org/details/@aad...
Even if I were not a Zone Books completist, I’d be pretty stoked about this one.
If you need me I’ll be gushing with gratitude while rereading this incredibly generous thread over and over (and half-wishing I was on a train somewhere sipping a beer and reading—you’ll see why if you read the thread! It’s 5 0’clock somewhere and all that 🍻)
Relatedly.
Psychedelic front cover of the New Directions edition of Solvej Balle's forthcoming novel.
A day later, I'm still waiting for the world to end & hoping that apocalypse will be postponed until after the release of Bk 4 of Solvej Balle's _On the Calculation of Volume_, scheduled for 4/14. Maybe others want to join me in focussing on that as the best of all possible distractions?
it's officially out! :)
Selfie, in which I am holding up a copy of my book, Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark
My book, LIKE A CAT LOVES A BIRD: THE NINE LIVES OF MURIEL SPARK, is out today!
Maybe I'm alone in thinking that it's a big deal for a state to mandate a canon, regardless of what's included in it. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/u...
A beautiful review of my new novel: thank you to the great Neil Bartlett. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/a...
A panel from a 1991 Peanuts comic strip showing Peppermint Patty at her school desk. She is saying, “Unprepared, unorganized, unsettled, uncertain, unsure, but awake!”
Good morning, friends!
A t-shirt with the outline of coke bottle and the word relatability on it.
In a desperate attempt to look forward to something: I'm making official Relatability shirts to promote my book--and you could be wearing one in the very near future! I'll send one out to the first 10 people to preorder the book and let me know about it: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
Personally I think when a world leader announces “Tune in tonight at 8pm Eastern to watch the world end” like it’s the fucking season premiere of Roseanne we should have a different leader the next day.
for national poetry month (which is every month if you're living right) here's a q&a for the @columbiaup.bsky.social blog about my book, STITCH, UNSTITCH: cupblog.org/2026/04/07/k...
UIC English is hiring 3 NTT faculty, part of our United Faculty Union. professional writing, english language learning, literature/culture generalism. hmu w questions!
uic.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
There's nothing that slaps your own inefficacy in your face more than close-reading a Donald Trump truth social post, but even so, the way his confident pronouncements wither into uncertainty a sentence later, the contradiction and incoherence of this, is mind-boggling
Extremely jealous
Lenin with Du Bois poster
chicago! next week, the brilliant @jonathanflatley.bsky.social at UIC!