Honored to have introduced @nkjemisin.bsky.social last night for the 2025 Spencer Trask Lecture @princeton.edu. Terrific questions about craft and writing process from the audience!

Legends of the fall @princeton.edu.

Insightful moment of “unselfing” at the end of DOPPELGÄNGER, where @naomiaklein.bsky.social reveals how formative Naomi Wolf had been to her authorial self-making. It’s a great twist because it suggests our ideological doubles are far closer to us in the ways that matter than we tend to admit.

Trent Walker (Michigan) delivers a wonderful talk on Cambodian Buddhist manuscripts inscribed on dried palm leaves. Part of the symposium celebrating the special collections exhibition FORMS AND FUNCTIONS: THE SPLENDORS OF GLOBAL BOOK MAKING.

Really interesting inaugural workshop of a Princeton-Humboldt initiative exploring “socionarratology.” Juliana Spahr’s keynote address, which addressed the foundation and government underwriting of radical poetry in the 1960s, was characteristically provocative. socionarratology.german.princeton.edu

Call for proposals: “Bibliographical Mysteries” at the Annual Meeting of the @bibsocamer.bsky.social, January 23, 2026. Panels, workshops, and creative and experimental formats are welcome. Come share your favorite stories about going down bookish rabbit holes 👉 bibsocamer.org/news/cfp-bsa26

Congratulations to the winner of this year’s SHARP Book History Prize, Martin Paul Eve, for THESES ON THE METAPHORS OF DIGITAL-TEXTUAL HISTORY @stanfordpress.bsky.social #SHARP2025

This was fun to fill out. My tastes lean toward the analog — on the cusp of the digital turn — but a couple of recent films have really stuck with me. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

At the Society for Textual Scholarship conference, Kenneth Price argues for greater attention to readers’ reports as a way of assessing publishers’ decisions in framing (racial) authorship.

Looking forward this colloquium hosted by the Reception Study Society, celebrating three new books in the field: "Women, Taste, and the Politics of Reading in Twentieth Century America.” All published in the terrific @umasspress.bsky.social book history series. Register 👉 receptionstudy.org/events

Join me for a talk with author-bookseller Katie Mitchell on her book PROSE TO THE PEOPLE: A CELEBRATION OF BLACK BOOKSTORES. Katie is a 2023 Dorothy Porter Wesley Fellow of @bibsocamer.bsky.social and will be in conversation with CBS News’ Alvin Patrick. Register 👉 bibsocamer.org/events/calen...

Catching up with some reading and discovered a wonderful letter to the editor from Jonathan Senchyne. He provides a useful corrective to the doom-and-gloom account of the current state of bibliography. @bibsocamer.bsky.social is lucky to have him as Associate Editor of its journal PBSA!

To think David Lynch teed up MULHOLLAND DR. with THE STRAIGHT STORY. An auteur exploring the limits of what he knows, letting cinema surprise him with new ways of seeing. RIP to the man from Missoula.

Had a great time presenting on Melvin Van Peebles and Georges Wolinski’s comics adaptation of Chester Himes’s FOR LOVE OF IMABELLE (aka A RAGE IN HARLEM) at Columbia. Thanks to Aubrey Gabel for the invitation, and to Zoë Henry for the thoughtful, elegant response.