My tatty 1976 hardcover of Renata Adler’s Speedboat.
2026 paperback reissue of Adler’s Speedboat.
It’s 50 years since Renata Adler’s incomparable novel ‘Speedboat’ was published: illuminative and dangerous as a lightning strike, bitingly funny, caustically insightful and marvellously stylish. Pub in US @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social, just reissued @wnbooks.bsky.social with intro by Hilton Als.
"Well, Genet had a phrase that I repeat often: ‘Difficulty is an author’s respect for the reader’, or rather, making him or her think, collaborate – the work is incomplete without the reader’s input…"
- Juan Goytisolo
16, attempting to hitchhike to Maine, standing on the shoulder of a highway onramp near Albany, with night coming on and 3 dollars in my pocket, when a guy in a white Ford Pinto rolls up and hands me $60 and a King James Bible. "Thanks man you saved my ass" I said. "No, God saved your ass," he said.
Well this is pretty much as insane as I expected it to be.
5 years of Socrates on the Beach... McElroy, Gass, Tudor-Sideri, Musil, Grill, Ariel Porte, Moore, Ulven, Blackwell, Craig, Theroux, Sims, Valéry, Stefanescu, Wood, Cărtărescu, Lutz, Hall, Haskell, Nutt, Ryder, Cárdenas, Khi Nao, Olsen, Handke, DeForest... socratesonthebeach.com
Our editor (in a silly hat) talks about her latest book (Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other from @coffeehousepress.bsky.social) and being a Dorothy fangirl at @cincinnatireview.bsky.social . . .
www.cincinnatireview.com/interviews/a...
They carry it in my local Wegmans in Upstate New York which I thought was incredible (no Lyons)
Checked back here for the first time in months and this is the first thing I saw. Happy Birthday Anthony!
Renata Adler, bringing the goods in PITCH DARK. Extraordinary passage, extraordinary novel.
Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates melancholy from happiness.
-- Woolf, Orlando
"Representing the canon that scholars of Asian American literature have built, it is the most expansive dataset to date on Asian American literature."
Data and essay: doi.org/10.18737/092...
The thing people who are terrified don’t understand about cities is that all you need to know is what is your business and what is not your business
Ah, the sour smell of fallen, trampled fruit fermenting on city sidewalks. It's one of my favorite smells of the year. Fills me with a great inner peace. We are nearing the end of the torrid heat.
Yeah incredible right?!
I had to google “sun butter” lol
Sitting in my office, starving, receiving updates from daycare that my daughter is being fed "sun butter and jelly sandwich, green beans and fruit cocktail"
Thank you!
Great new review of Jen Craig's Wall up over @greggerkesocrates.bsky.social's Socrates: "Her novels are at once obsessive attempts to give a full account of grief-laden lives, & a demonstration of the impossibility, the ridiculousness, even, of such a pursuit" socratesonthebeach.com/gus-oconnor-...
Our home bar from those days (which is sadly gone now that we’ve entered our sober toddler parenting era. I’m an IPA guy now 😢)
Found the hand-drawn cocktail book that my wife and I made during our drunken shut-in covid days.
Got a lil bagatelle at beloved @hexliterary.bsky.social
Sunday morning writing mantra, via DeLillo, from inside my cocoon of dimmed lights, closed doors, and noise-cancelling headphones: "A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it."
say it again:
4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities
demolishing higher education is economic sabotage
I believe these are the first four academic books to cite an episode of American Vandal, which, like, there will be prizes.
Wrote 1000 words on Gabriel Blackwell's DOOM TOWN, a strange and deeply affecting novel that I won't soon forget.
We're excited to start off our featured author posts with Elvis Bego's work "A Part"! Check out the rest of his work on our website (link in bio) in our Summer 2025 Issue out now!
Dasa Drndic, Trieste
I've been reading Trieste by Dasa Drndic for the last few days and it has absolutely wiped me out. Reading it next to Celan, Pound, etc., and my head is spinning. What a work of fiction - as well as a historical and documentary indictment of the world that reads it.
Such an exceptional novel. Read it a few years ago and it blew my mind. Don't think I've ever read a work of fiction that so urgently challenges the willing suspension of disbelief. Nothing quite like it.
Happy Bloomsday to all who celebrate
New work in @havehashad.com today! Another cheesy little dad piece that might be the cheesiest little dad piece I’ve written yet (while also maybe the one I had the most fun with?)