Author Grace Spulak sitting in the grass holding a copy of her book and a mug with the book cover printed on it
Happy Pub Day to Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think! 💙
Set in rural New Mexico—a place of isolation, strange beauty, and potential transformation—this inventive and emotionally nuanced collection explores the complexities of gender, queerness, trauma, and resilience.
@gspulak.bsky.social
Today we remember the horrific tragedy of the Columbine shooting. 27 years later, it is a disgrace that gun violence is still the leading cause of death for children in America.
A picture of a rather dilapidated copy of "The picture of Dorian Gray" There is visible water damage to the cover and the plastic cover is yellowing. Obviously, not evident from the picture but there is a truly foul musty smell emanating from it!
Last week, a gentleman returned this rather dilapidated copy of this famous book to us after 50 years. He had found it in his attic!
Presumably this means there is a pristine copy somewhere in our libraries....
“We wanted only the good news, but the bad news walked in front of us…”
Love the tension in this piece! 👏 #writersky #booksky #flashfiction #microlit
Love this piece—especially the nod to Sisyphus. #passagesnorth #poetry #writersky
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My issue of the magazine, propped up near my daffodiles
@passagesnorth.bsky.social is a dream pub for me because it's one of, like, three lit mags I'd actually heard of before I started doing all this. And here it is: "I Don't Need Your Whole Life Story," a piece about a guy who fakes his own death and it works so great he just keeps doing it.
wildroofjournal.com/issue-33-gal...
Many thanks to @passagesnorth.bsky.social for sharing my short piece, “At My Elementary School on the Air Force Base,” online! Read the full piece here! #flashprose #flashcnf #writersky #micro #booksky
Today’s story by Faye Brinsmead: “Wind Instrument” www.paragraphplanet.com
Odessa by Gabrielle Sher
What a debut! I really liked this one! Odessa is a gothic style horror rooted in real and unsettling history. It comes out April 21. I listened to an advanced listener copy through NetGalley and Hachette Audio. Full BookTok review: tinyurl.com/yc7vrx97
#booksky #horrorbook
Thanks to @merliterary.bsky.social for publishing my review of Nora Lange’s Daycare, out now from @twodollarradio.bsky.social #bookreview #writersky #booksky #twodollarradio
Long ago, a cat died from being fed four minutes past feeding time. Cats have told their children of this for 3,000 generations.
Haden White’s The Content and the Form; Gerard Genette’s Palimpsests; The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature; Time and Narrative by Paul Ricoeur; Unnatural Narrative by Brian Richardson; Introduction to Cognitive Narratology by Jan Alber
Thanks for re-sharing this, @fiveminutelit.bsky.social! #writersky #booksky #microcnf
Read latest issue of @gooseberrypielit.bsky.social with 12 amazing stories by @lucindakempe.bsky.social Mikki Aronoff @jekwriter.bsky.social @emilyrinkema.bsky.social @karenc.bsky.social Jeff Friedman @pleomorphic2.bsky.social
Don’t forget to submit to our writing comp. Details inside.
I love that republicans did everything to prosecute protestors and tried to strip funding from universities, but politicians are now stunned that college kids won’t protest about Iran. Our collective memory is two seconds long.
Amazing: we're already halfway to our first stretch goal! Thanks to everyone who's donated or shared already; spreading the word about ARB's fundraiser helps a ton!
I read this piece the other day and really admired it!! Great work! 👏
Big news! ARB's first fundraiser is officially live! We're shooting for the very modest goal of $1k, with lots of stretch goals in mind. Your support is of course appreciated, and any help in spreading the word would be wonderful!
NBCC member Emily Hall reviewed "I Was Alive Here Once," an anthology edited by Sarah Coolidge, for the Ancillary Review of Books:
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Bought this immediately! I found Hicks’s work through 100 Word Story, and I am excited to read this collection!! #booksky #writersky #flashfiction #microfiction
Very Pink Knits has a brioche tutorial. She makes video tutorials on YouTube; they’re shot super well and she talks you through each movement. I highly recommend her tutorials—I’ve learned a lot from them! 🧶
Photograph of Muriel Spark writing in a notebook, accompanied by the headline: From trolling Nazis to Miss Jean Brodie: the nine lives of Muriel Spark She swapped chilly Edinburgh for sex and sun in Rhodesia, then left her husband to write. James Bailey's biography Like a Cat Loves a Bird captures the complicated life of the brilliant novelist Paula Byrne Thursday April 02 2026, 5.00am, The Times
In 1967 the writer Muriel Spark, best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, moved from New York City to Rome. She was met at the airport by her friend Eugene Walter, an early admirer of her novels. Looking around for a tweedy woman wearing sensible shoes, he was amazed to see a transformed Spark, then aged 49. He had previously described her character as "cat and monkey" (feline but prone to monkeying around), but now he was dazzled by her elegant mink coat, high heels and immaculate hair and make-up. "Chic as shit," he pronounced. "I've seen about seven or eight Muriels," he later said. "I've liked them all."
Spark's lover and occasional writing partner Derek Stanford described her as a "pretty Persian cat with fascinating tricks" . In Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark, James Bailey extends the feline metaphor to shape the structure of his biography. It is a clever conceit. Spark's nine lives, also presented as a "series of flickering sparks" , neatly capture both the slipperiness and the picaresque quality of this most elusive of subjects.
As Bailey observes, "Cats wandered in and out of Spark's life, their names reading like the cast of an insalubrious drag troupe: Bluebell, Spider, Pasquetta, Serafina, Pinot Grigio." At one point, Spark adopted Patricia Highsmith's beloved cat, and her snails as well. An admirer of Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley, Spark had heard that Highsmith smuggled pet snails under her breasts when she travelled abroad. Spark, delighted by this detail, has a character in one of her novels breeding silkworms by incubating them between her breasts, only for them to hatch in hot weather, cascading on to the carpet from her flesh. Spark once said: "When a cat voluntarily disappears from home, it is merely because the whim has seized it to look for something less boring elsewhere." Spark's life, like those of her cats, was marked by sudden departures and unexpected entrances.
Well, this is bonkers. Sharing a few extracts from this gorgeous, and very detailed, review of LIKE A CAT LOVES A BIRD: THE NINE LIVES OF MURIEL SPARK in The Times.
And now I need a sit down with a cup of tea to recover (good thing I'm literally always sitting down with a cup of tea, then).
Issue 6 of Pictura Journal is out now! 🎉 #writersky #litmagazine #booksky #flashprose
#poetry
I love how this mimics the back-and-forth movements of grass cutting!
Thank you so much for publishing my review of this anthology, @ancillaryreviewofbooks.org. I really loved this collection: so many great horror writers from around the world! #booksky #writersky @twolinespress.com
Thank you so much for this, @michaelgrantsmith.bsky.social!!! ⛈️ #flashfiction #writersky #booksky #flashprose
