Returned home from Hambidge last weekend and I've been dreaming about it ever since. Added 30 pages to my novel project, drafted a new short story, wrote some poems, revised a bunch of stuff, read 8 books, and met amazing people (we started a book club!). One of the most peaceful places I've been.

Propulsive and terrifying. Four roommates try to navigate their roommate drama while fiery disaster lurks ever closer.

Btw, Creature Publishing is reliably good: creaturehorror.com

"Sometimes life feels really terrible for no apparent reason. So chin up; your pain is not unique."

Tidbeck is one of the greats. What beautifully bewildering, unnerving stuff.

"On the other side of the apple orchard was a loud party, where a gathering of nobles played croquet with human heads, and their changeling servants hid under the tables, telling each other stories to keep the fear away."

Bring in the New Year with fresh panic!

Panic Now?: Tools For Humanizing by @rhetlab.bsky.social has undone and remade my thinking about our world’s crises. You should read this. From @utpress.bsky.social.

“Panic is not a replacement for loving the world, but a way into doing so very differently."

Bittersweet story of love & longing from @tinhouse.bsky.social.

“They read. The sounds of paper between them as they turn and crease and carefully avoid touching each other. Then, sounds of their coworkers arriving, doors unlatching and footfalls. Their morning ending. Time to wake up, she thinks.”

Huge fan of Dash Shaw's Blurry from @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social. Stories within stories within stories. Slight-seeming interactions nested inside each other in such a way that you start asking questions about the very nature of human connection, about what it means to change who you are.

Potent, brutal stories of women who find ways to breathe in places without air. Moustadraf left us too early.

"That's all I know about marriage: hammam, henna, ululations, and a man who slaps you to prove he's stronger than you. And after that he fills your belly with kids and hits the road."

Attic didn't change my life like Geek Love, but these sentences:

"He slept in my bed when I was alone and resented it when I wasn't. I put my hands into his drinking water and dipped out his dry food with my hands so that my smell would be a part of everything important to him. He had to love me."

Hard to explain how much I love @terrylkennedy.bsky.social's What the Light Leaves Hidden, how radically it's changed my thinking on grief and loss. A transformative book.

"If our lives truly end, then
as the stars': still gifting light
to those waiting here, alone,
in the darkness."

Finally got to this one. Sometimes I wonder if a religious childhood would've helped me feel more the weight of these stories of faith and redemption and sin. Still fun.

"It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church."

Glad to read my first Heti this year. Wild ride, sheesh. Can't wait to read more.

Read this at VCCA-France in a studio overlooking the Garonne. What luck.

"A person can waste their whole life, without even meaning to, all because another person has a really great face."

A surprising DeLillo, ghosts and regret and pain, lovely little moments shining through:

"She almost said, 'Is that smart?' But then she didn't. Because what a needless thing. Because how petty it would be to say such a thing, in the morning or at any time, on a strong bright day after a storm."

Every book from @transitbooks.bsky.social's Undelivered Lectures series is a banger. Serpell asks us to rethink our relationship to faces, to consider "the complex pleasures--dangerous, but not necessarily unethical--of treating the human face with the attention and value we grant a work of art."

A witty, challenging novel with a surrealist streak. Much of the dialogue is from interviews Beilin recorded. A refreshingly new thing, this book. From the excellent @dorothyproject.bsky.social.

"A child's fingers are very sharp like a demon's. They can pierce into things, especially stones."

"... we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable, in the world; that the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure, like playing pieces of a game, and cannot move of their own accord; that they are held in place by our need for them, by our love. How stupid."

Another favorite I read this year.

Spare, quiet stories threaten to slip right by unless you give your whole attention.

"You no longer have the illusion that by taking lessons and working diligently you could steadily improve your singing. Still, you may try again." (From "Learning to Sing.")

Daily this December I'm gonna try to post something about a book I read and liked this year.

Unsettling, disgusting, fun as hell. Gisler's debut, About Uncle, from the always trusty @twolinespress.bsky.social.

"The more you look into the distance the more the horizon blurs into the sea."