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eldashraheb.bsky.social
Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
@eldashraheb.bsky.social
3.5K followers 4.7K following 2.7K posts
https://www.abeelraheb.com
Egyptian-American
Editor and Writer (WGA West)
Desperately trying to learn Spanish
We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
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eldashraheb.bsky.social
Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · Jun 18
Once again, I’m reading Nabakov shit on your (and my) faves, while praising them too. Always a great time. #booksky 💙📚
Chesterton, G. K. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14. Essentially a writer for very young people. Romantic in the large sense. • Conan Doyle, Arthur. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14, but no longer. Essentially a writer for very young people. Romantic in the large sense. • Conrad, Joseph. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14. Essentially a writer for very young people. Certainly inferior to Hemingway and Wells. Intolerable souvenir-shop style, romanticist clichés. Nothing I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, hopelessly juvenile. Romantic in the large sense. Slightly bogus. • Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Dislike him. A cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. A prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. Some of his scenes are extraordinarily amusing. Nobody takes his reactionary journalism seriously. • The Double. His best work, though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's "Nose." • The Brothers Karamazov. Dislike it intensely. • Crime and Punishment. Dislike it intensely. Ghastly rigmarole. • Douglas, Norman. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. • Dreiser, Theodore. Dislike him. A formidable mediocrity. • Eliot, T. S. Not quite first-rate. • Emerson, Ralph Waldo. His poetry is delightful. • Faulkner, William. Dislike him. Writer of corncobby chronicles. To consider them masterpieces is an absurd delusion. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me. • Flaubert, Gustave. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. Read complete works between 14 and 15. • Forster, E. M. Only read one of his novels (possibly A Passage to India?) and disliked it. • Freud, Sigmund. A figure of fun. Loathe him. Vile deceit. Freudian interpretation of dreams is charlatanic, and satanic, nonsense. • Galsworthy, John. A formidable mediocrity. • García Lorca, Federico. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. • Gogol, Nikolai. Nobody takes his mystical didacticism seriously. At his worst, as in his Ukrainian stu… • Hemingway, Ernest. A writer of books for boys. Certainly better than Conrad. Has at least a voice of his own. Nothing I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, hopelessly juvenile. Loathe his works about bells, balls, and bulls. • The Killers. Delightful, highly artistic. Admirable. • The Old Man and the Sea. Wonderful. The description of the iridescent fish and rhythmic urination is superb. • Housman, A. E. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. • Ilf and Petrov. Two wonderfully gifted writers. Absolutely first-rate fiction. • Ivanov, Georgy. A good poet but a scurrilous critic. • James, Henry. Dislike him rather intensely, but now and then his wording causes a kind of electric tingle. Certainly not a genius. • Joyce, James. Great. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. Let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is patball to Joyce's champion game. A genius. • Ulysses. A divine work of art. Greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose. Towers above the rest of Joyce's writing. Noble originality, unique lucidity of thought and style. Molly's monologue is the weakest chapter in the book. Love it for its lucidity and precision. • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Never liked it. A feeble and garrulous book. • Finnegans Wake. A formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book. Conventional and drab, redeemed from utter insipidity only by infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations. Detest it. A cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory. Indifferent to it, as to all regional literature written in dialect. A tragic failure and a frightful bore. • Kafka, Franz. • The Metamorphosis. Second-greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose. • Kazantzakis, Nikos. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. • Keats, John. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. • Khodasevich, Vladislav. The gr… • Lawrence, D. H. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. Mediocre. Fakes realism with easy platitudes. Execrable. • Lowell, Robert. Not a good translator. A greater offender than Auden. • Mandelshtam, Osip. A wonderful poet, the greatest in Soviet Russia. His poems are admirable specimens of the human mind at its deepest and highest. Not as good as Blok. His tragic fate makes his poetry seem greater than it actually is. • Mann, Thomas. Dislike him. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. • Death in Venice. Asinine. To consider it a masterpiece is an absurd delusion. Poshlost. Mediocre, but anyway plausible. • Maupassant, Guy de. Certainly not a genius. • Maugham, W. Somerset. Mediocre. Fakes realism with easy platitudes. Certainly not a genius. • Melville, Herman. Love him. One would like to have filmed him at breakfast, feeding a sardine to his cat. • Marx, Karl. Loathe him. • Milton, John. A genius. • Odoevsky, Vladimir. Indifferent to his works. • Yury Olesha. Some absolutely first-rate fiction. • Orczy, Baroness Emmuska. • The Scarlet Pimpernel. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, but no longer. • Pasternak, Boris. An excellent poet, but a poor novelist. • Doctor Zhivago. Detest it. Melodramatic and vilely written. To consider it a masterpiece is an absurd delusion. Pro-Bolshevist, historically false. A sorry thing, clumsy, trivial, melodramatic, with stock situations and trite coincidences. • Pirandello, Luigi. Never cared for him. • Plato. Not particularly fond of him. • Poe, Edgar Allan. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, but no longer. One would like to have filmed his wedding. • Pound, Ezra. Definitely second-rate. A total fake. A venerable fraud. • Proust, Marcel. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. • In Search of Lost Time. The first half is the fourth-greatest masterpiece of 20th-century prose. • Queneau, Raymond. • Exercises de style. A thrilling masterpiece, one of the greatest stories in French literature. • Zazie. Very fond of it. • Ransom, John Crowe. • Captain Carpenter. Admire this poem. • Rimbaud, Arthur. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. • Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Great. A favorite. How freely one breathes in his marvelous labyrinths! Lucidity of thought, purity of poetry. Magnificently poetical and original. • Rolland, Romain. A formidable mediocrity. • Salinger, J. D. By far one of the finest artists in recent years. • "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." A great story. A particular favorite. • Sartre, Jean-Paul. Even more awful than Camus. • Nausea. Second-rate. A tense-looking but really very loose type of writing. • Schwartz, Delmore. • "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." A particular favorite. • Schweitzer, Albert. Detest him. • Shakespeare, William. Read complete works between 14 and 15. One would like to have filmed him in the role of the King's Ghost. His verbal poetic texture is the greatest the world has ever known, and immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. It is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play. A genius. • Sterne, Laurence. Love him. • Sue, Eugène. Melodramatic, second-rate. • Tagore, Rabindranath. A formidable mediocrity. • Tolstoy, Aleksey. A writer of some talent with two or three science fiction stories or novels which are memorable. • Tolstoy, Leo. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. Read complete works between 14 and 15. Nobody takes his utilitarian moralism seriously. A genius. • Anna Karenina. Incomparable prose artistry. The supreme masterpiece of 19th-century literature. • The Death of Ivan Ilyich. A close second to Anna Karenina. • Resurrection. Detest it. • The Kreutzer Sonata. Detest it. • War and Peace. A little too long. A rollicking historical novel written for the general reader, specifically for the young. Artistically unsatisfying. Cumbersome mes…
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
ronanhession.bsky.social
Just saw on Wikipedia that Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto has sold 20 million copies – the same number as Pride and Prejudice.
January 7, 2026 at 4:46 PM
eldashraheb.bsky.social
Let’s go!!!

m.youtube.com/watch?v=ssuu...
Top 30 Albums Of 2025!
YouTube video by Myke C-Town
m.youtube.com
January 7, 2026 at 8:59 PM
eldashraheb.bsky.social
Things are overwhelming on personal and political levels. To unwind, I’ll go catch a matinee of the new Safdie film
January 7, 2026 at 8:48 PM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
storyslug.bsky.social
"This does nothing to help the American people!"

"So what if it did?"

"Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh"

Yeah, maybe don't fucking link those two concepts, dipshits.
January 7, 2026 at 5:26 PM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
ironspike.bsky.social
Don’t let your dreams be dreams
A bowl of risotto and butter chicken.
January 7, 2026 at 7:44 AM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
netscape.bsky.social
Baudrillard would’ve loved Kirkification
January 7, 2026 at 7:27 AM
eldashraheb.bsky.social
Reading about Philip Snowden and thinking he may have been the inspiration for Skull Face
Philip Snowden Skull Face
January 7, 2026 at 6:35 AM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
nickfield.bsky.social
31% of young men "report having been homeless or near homeless in the past five years". 28% "of employed young men report having more than one paying job" puck.news/wp-content/u...
puck.news
January 7, 2026 at 2:48 AM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
pattymo.com
A touching tribute to Mike F
Classic Mike F tweet: Check this shit out motherfucker [I slide one foot out from under me and fall on my ass, its not clear what kind of move I was trying to do]
January 7, 2026 at 2:40 AM
eldashraheb.bsky.social
The one and only real answer. Matched if not supplanted the Sopranos
January 7, 2026 at 2:27 AM
eldashraheb.bsky.social
Inshallah we’re gonna make it
pleasebegneiss.bsky.social slate @pleasebegneiss.bsky.social · 19h
looking forward to very normal discourse about this
fat pikachu is returning to pokemon for first time in 30 years
January 7, 2026 at 2:26 AM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
samthielman.com
Got a Barnes & Noble gift certificate, immediately bought the Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure Criterion edition
January 7, 2026 at 1:58 AM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
wolter.bsky.social
Trout Mask Replica is proof that you actually make much better music as a charismatic leader in California in 1969 using abusive cult tactics to break down a group of followers if you don’t focus on race wars and murder.
January 7, 2026 at 1:50 AM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
tranniehathaway.bsky.social
This country only wants cishet white men to fight for it?
July 23, 2025 at 3:37 AM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
samadams.bsky.social
Benicio del Toro up first at @nyfcc.bsky.social awards. And here’s my booklet essay, for his Best Supporting Actor win.
There are supporting pertormances and there are load-bearing ones, turns so essential to a movie’s existence that without them the whole structure might crumble to the ground. At first glance, Benicio del Toro's Sergio St. Carlos might seem a mere sidekick, the buddy who gets One Battle After Another's Bob Ferguson out of a jam and gives up his own freedom so the movie's protagonist can go free. But sit with it a little, and you might realize Sergio is no one's second fiddle. He's the hero. In the midst of a story about would-be revolutionaries agitating for sudden change, Sergio embodies the opposite - not acquiescence, but methodical, sustained resistance. Unlike the French 75's headline-grabbing pyrotechnics or the Christmas Adventurers Club's sinister cabal, Sergio's "Latino Harriet Tubman situation" has no name, no manifesto or underground lair, just a wide-spreading network of ordinary people waiting for their moment to do the right thing. It's no accident that Sergio's public-facing persona is as a teacher of judo, the art of turning your opponent's aggression against them. (Paul Thomas Anderson pitched del Toro the character by sending him a picture of a tiger in a kimono.) He may prize the ancient rifle he loans to Bob, but he hardly seems like the type to fire it. When he guides Bob's daughter, Willa, through her kata, his main advice is simple: "Don't forget to breathe." He gives Bob the same counsel, in different words: "Ocean waves, ocean waves." Barely a month after One Battle's release, the streets of Halloween were dotted with Sergios, glasses halfway down their noses, a few small beers at their side- a tribute to del Toro's instantly iconic performance. But it's also a tribute to what Sergio stands for, his patience, his decency, his ability to stay cool while never giving up the fight. Viva la revolución.
January 7, 2026 at 12:55 AM
eldashraheb.bsky.social
First half: B-
Second half: A - A+
#booksky 💙📚
George Eliot’s Adam Bede
January 7, 2026 at 12:57 AM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
actupper.bsky.social
Rank cowards.
January 6, 2026 at 9:07 PM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
oldmanweldon.bsky.social
"it's not... believable" brother you got that right
atrupar.com Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 1d
Trump: "Transgender for everyone! Bring your kids in, we're gonna change the sex of your child. Just send them our way. In some cases, like in Minnesota, they don't even tell the parents. Nobody believes it when I say it. They operate on the kid, they don't tell the parents. It's not believable."
January 6, 2026 at 8:58 PM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
yelix.bsky.social
so many people are gonna evaluate his mayorship through the lens of “did he deliver a socialist revolution or not” but honestly if he just does a bunch of stuff like this for 4-8 years i’m good
misernyc.bsky.social Miser @misernyc.bsky.social · 1d
Zohran just went out and fixed the Williamsburg Bridge bike entrance. Just did it. No faffing, no nonsense. Bam. Fixed.
January 6, 2026 at 8:58 PM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
chadstanton.blacksky.app
Perfect example of a political movement of people who can’t recognize when they’ve won because they define themselves by their losses.
pbump.com Philip Bump @pbump.com · 1d
fuck outta here
January 6, 2026 at 6:54 PM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
mrpussy.xyz
when mom brings home dino nuggies from the nuggies store
Trump with his tongue out looking like an excited baby
January 6, 2026 at 7:49 PM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
hillenjoyer.bsky.social
a three year old trying to say the word lasagna is so good
January 6, 2026 at 7:51 PM
eldashraheb.bsky.social
Sátántangó is the best film I’ve seen in the past 5 years. The supreme distillation of what COVID and the ensuing 2020s has felt like - and it came out in 1994. RIP

www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ja...
Béla Tarr, Hungarian director of Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies, dies aged 70
The internationally acclaimed film-maker was renowned for beautifully shot cinematic epics
www.theguardian.com
January 6, 2026 at 5:38 PM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
irishlittimes.bsky.social
Bluemoose Books snaps up fourth novel by Leonard and Hungry Paul author Rónán Hession
www.thebookseller.com/rights/bluem...
Bluemoose Books snaps up fourth novel by Rónán Hession
Bluemoose Books has acquired Richard Heart Julianne, Rónán Hession’s fourth novel.
www.thebookseller.com
January 6, 2026 at 4:02 PM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
mrpussy.xyz
Bolsonaro fell out of bed last night and hit his head, and (to no one's surprise) is receiving medical attention
eixopolitico.com.br Eixo Político @eixopolitico.com.br · 1d
🇧🇷 Jair Bolsonaro caiu da cama durante a noite e bateu a cabeça em um móvel da sua cela.

Segundo Michelle Bolsonaro, o ex-presidente “não está bem” e só recebeu atendimento nesta manhã, horas depois do acidente.
January 6, 2026 at 4:25 PM