24JUL24 / accessions

Pierre’s Release The Bats because apparently I can still be tempted to buy “how to write” books, but only when they promise to be distinctly unlike most “how to write” books.

Usually, that promise turns out to be egregiously false—perhaps because I seem to have parsed the promise as meaning something like “you’ll never need or want to buy another one of these things after this one”, and I’m still somehow drawn back to them like the sort of smoker who has quit, but habitually bums cigs off their mates on the rare occasions that they go to the pub in company.

On the basis of the first handful of chapters, however, I think this might actually be the real deal: it’s more concerned with the world to be written about than with the world to be written in, if you see what I mean?

(The challenge and ambiguity of that distinction is exactly the appeal, at least for me.)


Dederer’s Monsters because I have become deeply unsatisfied with the standard answers to the question of “problematic” creators—both my own answers, and those of society more broadly—and this seems widely acknowledged to be the best long-form attempt at it.


O’Brien and Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone because it’s being praised in all sorts of places for its having attempted to realise some of the ideals I have for speculative fiction, and I’m hoping that it manages to have realised them without also having realised too many of the failings that seem ever more invariably to accompany such attempts. (Or, more succinctly: it is my hope that this is a genuinely utopian text, and not just another kumbaya future-fantasy.)


Greenlaw’s The Vast Extent because it got onto my “books to maybe buy” list for reasons I am unable to recall, but looked interesting enough when I was last scrolling through said list for me to actually buy it on impulse, despite my not remembering why wanted it in the first place.

(I think it’s probably because I’m getting more interested in the contemporary essay as a form, because it seems like there is something of a renaissance happening therein? Not that I’m really au fait with the earlier eras of the essay—for someone who now writes for a living, I am very poorly read when it comes to belles lettres—but people seem to be writing on interesting topics with exciting and experimental techniques, and that feels like a thing I want to encounter more of. Plus the cover is nice.)

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