Category: General
-
something you get a gold star on
There’s a little aside in the last few paragraphs of Joanne McNeil’s latest newsletter which manages to totally nail something otherwise rather nebulous about contemporary fiction, a thing that I’ve been struggling to articulate clearly. After a re-read of China Miéville’s The City & the City, Jo wonders: Where are the writers with edges? I…
-
the distinction that now counts for me
… the distinction that now counts for me is not between critical and creative practices, or between aesthetic and other uses of literature. It is between work done to please power, and work done in the face of death. Irina Dumitrescu https://creativecritical.net/why-im-no-longer-a-proper-academic/
-
guten morgen, Hamburg
-
23JUN23 / midsommar
I had plans to actually celebrate the summer solstice properly this year by going along the coast to Ales Stenar, a stone circle site which is presumed to have been constructed some time in the Nordic iron Age, around 1,500 years ago. Of course, events (dear boy) intervened, and so I’ll be doing a rather…
-
22JUN23 / accessions
The accessions department considered any new Ann Leckie a non-negotiable acquisition, given the institution’s response to previous volumes by the same author. Tchaikovsky is actually a newcomer to the institutional collection, which is somewhat surprising given the author’s astonishing productivity and sterling reputation. That this volume collects novellas rather than being part of an extended…