Valarie Smith
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valarie.bsky.social
Valarie Smith
@valarie.bsky.social
930 followers 140 following 6.1K posts
Welcome, book lovers! 💙📚

Probably rereading Woolf’s The Waves or listening to the Backlisted podcast. Also a fan of Sam Shepard, Kerouac, Dickens, Steinbeck, Willy Vlautin, Donna Tartt, film noir, Twin Peaks, Elliott Smith, Grimm & folklore. Portland, OR
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valarie.bsky.social
A tuxedo cat with a white bib stares out of a linen closet with bright yellow eyes. On the shelf above her is a Halloween lantern of a black cat with big eyes. These mimic the painting I’ve reposted, which show three black cats with big yellow eyes.
November 14, 2025 at 8:48 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Me at the NYRB.com sale. Did I mention you can get up to 40% off?

www.nyrb.com
Photo of an Asian man (Chow Yun-Fat) wearing a suit and sunglasses setting an American $100 bill on fire
November 14, 2025 at 7:59 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Post a non-religious photo you think of as holy.
A dark-haired man (Keanu Reeves) in a navy suit jacket with white button down shirt sits at the foot of a statue holding a blonde man (River Phoenix) who is sound asleep. The blond man is wearing white jeans and a salmon colored jacket. It’s meant to look like Michelangelo’s statue Pieta, which shows Mary holding Jesus after he’s been taken down from the cross. The vibe is that the dark-haired man is protecting the blond one. It’s a still from the movie My Own Private Idaho, which is my favorite movie in the world.
November 11, 2025 at 12:04 AM
valarie.bsky.social
In those earlier years, he and Jessica Lange were one hell of a handsome, fiery couple.
Black and white photo of a tall, handsome man in a dark shirt holding and kissing the head of a shorter, beautiful woman with wet, slicked back hair in a white shirt. His left arm holds her tight while his right hand holds a bottle of beer. It’s a loving photo, but if you know anything about his alcoholism, which probably is the primary reason for the dissolution of their relationship, then it’s a lot more prescient than they realized.
November 10, 2025 at 7:47 PM
valarie.bsky.social
Been looking at old diner menus and am convinced if I incant these words 3x over a cauldron, I'll be transported to 1978 Pennsylvania:

Rye bread, stuffed cabbage, fried clams, open-faced turkey sandwich, flounder, meat loaf, Monte Cristo, croquettes, chicken parm, chipped beef, pierogies, goulash.
A photo of a red neon sign that says BREAKFAST ALL DAY.
November 9, 2025 at 6:38 AM
valarie.bsky.social
This killed me
A bumper sticker that says I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH PTO FOR WWIII
November 9, 2025 at 4:51 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Look at this photo.
A woman with gray hair and clenched fists is in the middle of the street, yelling at ICE officers. She is wearing a long, red, short sleeve dress or tee with a white tee under it. Behind her, and slightly blurry, is a younger man with a white tee, blue jeans and a phone on one hand and the other hand giving the middle finger. To me, this is a powerful photo that speaks to the rage of all kinds of regular Americans to the cruelty of the ICE program.
November 7, 2025 at 10:49 PM
valarie.bsky.social
The cabin Kerouac lived in with Gary Snyder in The Dharma Bums is maybe a 1/2 mile away. I dragged my carry-on luggage through small, winding streets filled with purring BMWs and Mercedes to get there. I was the only person walking.

The shack they lived in was on top of this hill but was torn down.
Photo of an unremarkable piece of residential land. On the right is a plain, rundown brown house, but on the left you see a lot of trees and shrubbery cresting on top of a very small hill. At the top is where Kerouac and Snyder lived for a short time.
November 6, 2025 at 7:10 AM
valarie.bsky.social
I took this photo in front of his Mill Valley, CA home, where he was living when he won the Pulitzer for Buried Child. I love his prose most, but everything he wrote illuminated some aspect of the American myth.

Sam Shepard
Born Nov. 5, 1943
My hand holding up a copy of Sam Shelard’s book Seven Plays, which features a black and white photo of him in his 40s looking pensive, maybe even angry; in the background is the home he used to live in. The garage is in the bottom floor and the living space is on top of it.
November 6, 2025 at 7:10 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Illustrator Ella Baron nailing it in The Guardian: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
A one-panel comic that shows the Statue of Liberty crouched on a dark street in what looks like Gotham. Trump Tower looms in the background. She looks sad, defeated and is holding a handwritten sign, much like a beggar would, that says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But wait! There is Mamdani, like a superhero but also just a normal guy in a suit and long jacket, holding up what looks like Liberty’s torch. He has a huge smile on his face. So do I.
November 6, 2025 at 4:58 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Ooooh, this season’s Orion magazine is about “the natural rhythms of hip-hop” and features work by Jesmyn Ward, Hanif Abdurraqib, Questlove, Missy Elliott and Ross Gay!
The cover of Orion magazine, featuring a Black person’s hand on a white and gray horse. The hand has a large gold ring and watch on it.
November 5, 2025 at 10:17 PM
valarie.bsky.social
Happy birthday, Sam. We’ve never had more need of you.
Over 20 Sam Shepard books lined up vertically on a table with an autumnal bouquet behind it.
November 5, 2025 at 6:41 PM
valarie.bsky.social
Fun surprises: The man on this cover is Don Cherry, the cover design is by Chip Kidd, the graphics were set by a company in my hometown.

The first poem is a beauty:

“The pines make
a music like no other, rising and
falling like a distant surf at night
that calms the darkness before
first light.”
The cover of Philip Levine’s Breath: Poems. It says he’s the winner of the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. The top third of the book is gray with his name in white; the bottom 2/3 is a black and white photo of a Black man in a subway station with maybe an old music case under his arm. He’s young, his hair cut relatively close, and his eyes look off to the right. Other people wait for the train a little way behind him. GOSPEL The new grass rising in the hills, the cows loitering in the morning chill, a dozen or more old browns hidden in the shadows of the cottonwoods beside the streambed. I go higher to where the road gives up and there's only a faint path strewn with lupine between the mountain oaks. I don't ask myself what I'm looking for. I didn't come for answers to a place like this, I came to walk on the earth, still cold, still silent. Still ungiving, I've said to myself, although it greets me with last year's dead thistles and this year's hard spines, early-blooming wild onions, the curling remains of spider's cloth. What did I bring to the dance? In my back pocket a crushed letter from a woman I've never met bearing bad news I can do nothing about. So I wander these woods half sightless while a west wind picks up in the trees clustered above. The pines make a music like no other, rising and falling like a distant surf at night that calms the darkness before first light. "Soughing" we call it, from Old English, no less. How weightless words are when nothing will do.
November 3, 2025 at 2:07 AM
valarie.bsky.social
“Wonderful downpour of leaf”

It’s worth reading the whole thing.
Wonderful downpour of leaf: when the morning sun began to melt the frost they fell at one touch and in a few minutes a whole tree was flung of them; they lay masking and papering the ground at the foot. Then the tree seems to be looking down on its cast self as blue sky on snow after a long fall, its losing, its doing. Gerald Manley Hopkins, 1873
November 3, 2025 at 1:45 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Reading this book, in which the protagonist details her strange experiences in the afterlife. At one point, she is walking through a store now underwater. “The Sound of Silence” still plays on the speaker; she says, “It warbles in the murk.”

What a perfect, clean, precise sentence.
The cover of Anne De Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. It shows the silhouette of a crow, which contains the title and author within it, against a bright yellowish-greenish cover. I particularly like the details of the crow: the spindly, pointed claws and legs; the ragged feathers. The illustration is by Denise Nestor.
November 2, 2025 at 2:24 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Celia Fremlin’s biography is quite something.
CELIA FREMLIN (1914-2009) was born in Kent and spent her childhood in Hertfordshire. She then studied at the University of Oxford whilst working as a charwoman. During the Second World War, she served as an air-raid warden before becoming involved with the Mass Observation Project, collaborating on a study of women workers, War Factory. In 1942 she married Elia Goller, moved to Hampstead and had three children. In 1968, their youngest daughter, aged nineteen, took her own life; a month later, her husband did the same. In the wake of these tragedies, Fremlin briefly relocated to Geneva. In 1985, she married Leslie Minchin, with whom she lived until his death in 1999. Over four decades, Fremlin wrote sixteen celebrated novels - including the classic seaside mystery Uncle Paul and Christmas noir The Long Shadow - as well as one book of poetry and three story collections. Her debut, The Hours Before Dawn, won the Edgar Award in 1960.
October 29, 2025 at 6:30 AM
valarie.bsky.social
** New Willy Vlautin klaxon **

Willy's new novel, The Left and The Lucky, is coming out in the US on April 14! You can preorder it in Jan. at his local bookstore.

UK fans, his latest email says, "More to come soon from Faber & Faber about pub. date and tour!"

tworiversbooks.com/book/9780063...
Photo of Vlautin's new book The Left and the Lucky. The cover is sea green and there's a drawing of a 70s red muscle car with a guy hanging out the passenger side. The title and author name alternate between black and white.
October 29, 2025 at 5:03 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Indeed.
Back of the book: 'THE GRANDMOTHER OF PSYCHO-DOMESTIC NOIR.' SUNDAY TIMES A WIFE DISCOVERS AN UNSUSPECTED TALENT WHILE HER HUSBAND IS AWAY. A FATHER BUYS A PET LION WITH GLITTERING GREEN EYES. A MOTHER BECOMES STRANGELY OBSESSED WITH A NEIGHBOUR'S CHILD. A HUSBAND ABANDONS HIS FAMILY FOR A DAY, WITH UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES. AN UNWANTED FRIEND SPENDS A WEEKEND IN A HAUNTED HOUSE. 'HORRORS... LURK IN FEMALE DOMESTICITY. AND FREMLIN HAS LONG BEEN THE MISTRESS OF THEIR FICTIONAL PRESENTATION.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT ISBN 978-0-571-39130-1
October 28, 2025 at 3:51 AM
valarie.bsky.social
This is my 2nd Celia Fremlin book after the riveting The Hours Before Dawn. She reminds me of du Maurier, her eye for weakness deliciously, almost predatorily precise. It’s as if each page draws back the bow and arrow, strings tightening until the final release. Only 2 stories in and it’s a banger.
A photo of a book called By Horror Haunyed by Celia Fremlin. On a bright yellow cover is a small, perfect looking house and a gigantic crow, bigger than the house itself, sitting on the roof. The title is written at the top as thick red blocks and the author’s name is in the same yellow as the cover, with the letters written in red outline.
October 28, 2025 at 3:43 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Fascinated by the punctuation Sarah Waters chose in this paragraph of Fingersmith. I had to read it aloud to process it and particularly appreciated the semicolon bracing us for her failure of imagination.

But did the first em dash need to be there? I’m not convinced.
She turns away, and her look grows vague. She is thinking of her home. I try to imagine it; and cannot. I try to imagine her cousins: rough boys and girls, sharp-faced like her, sharp-tongued, sharp-fingered— Her fingers are blunt, however; though her tongue-for sometimes, when putting the pins to my hair, or frowning over slithering laces, she shows it—her tongue has a point. I watch her sigh.
October 24, 2025 at 7:04 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Watching MST3K do the truly terrible 1984 film Cave Dwellers, directed by Joe D'Amato, who was famous for horror and porn. But his son, Daniele Massaccesi, went on to be cameraman for The English Patient, The Talented Mr Ripley, Munich, House of Gucci and John Wick.

www.imdb.com/name/nm05571...
Very funny still from Mystery Science Theater 3k's production of Cave Dwellers. It shows a gold robot with a head crafted from a lacrosse stick and a bowling pin for a nose; a blond-haired, blue-eyed man in a red jumpsuit, looking completely strung out; and a red robot whose head looks like a gumball machine and has a fez as a cap. The set is supposed to look like the inside of a spaceship.
October 24, 2025 at 5:37 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Most joyful of mail days. I want to run and jump into this stack like it’s a pile of leaves on the ground.
Photo of 5 books in a white table: a photography book of Oasis by Jill Furmanovsky, Kilvert’s Diary, On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming, By Horror Haiuntee by Celia Fremlin, Ambush at Still Lake: Poems by Caroline Bird
October 22, 2025 at 8:57 AM
valarie.bsky.social
If Graham Greene’s film criticism and Brian Patten’s poetry interest you, check out Backlisted Patreon-only podcast Locklisted. (Will it inspire @brianlibby.bsky.social to read his copy of Greene’s essays & I my Patten book, which we’ve had for decades? Stay tuned!)

www.patreon.com/backlisted?u...
Photo of two books on a black table: the first is The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews and Film Stories, Edited by David Parkinson, which is written in black and white on the right while the left part of the cover is a close-up of half of Greene’s face; he’s wearing a suit and looks concerned. The other book says Brian Patten’s Storm Damage, which is written in gold but you can barely read it because the light washes it out and I’m a terrible photographer, and there’s a moody black and white photo of Patten looking over his right shoulder to the camera.
October 22, 2025 at 2:59 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Well, I sure picked the ideal thing to read for a long weekend away.
A photo of the book Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
October 20, 2025 at 6:58 AM
valarie.bsky.social
Define “Perfect Ending.”
Black and white screenshot from the Fellini film 8 1/2, in which the main character and many figures from his life, like his wife, parents and mistress, have joined hands and are moving in a circle. It’s meant to look and feel kind of like a circus.
October 19, 2025 at 7:54 AM