James Crossley

I’m don’t think they’re on Bluesky, but the folks at Tomorrow Bookstore in Indianapolis know a lot about this.

It’s cold enough here that these are probably still fresh www.originaloysterhousepittsburgh.com

That’s just how we live now, I guess

The Fine Arts building—still with manually operated elevators

They say literature is made out of other literature and that if you write something new, for example, it would amount to gibberish; no one alive would be able to understand it. Can write technically correct prose in my native language, but I could never compose Russian literature because, for better or worse, the literature I know most intimately is part of the American canon. Even British literature, with the exception of Robert Burns, sounds like Beowulf to me. (Moby-Dick-less.) There’s no Nathaniel West in British, no Casey at the Bat, or joy in Mudville. Every word has to have a lineage in the history of the language that makes it mean what it means.

Such a headspinningly good read

East St. Louis transit stop?

Zelig?

Text generated by a Zohran Mamdani meme generator reading This is my substitute for pistol and ball

That’s fantastic! Any chance of more Ben Jonson stories?

“book”

Should have said “very generous offer—go right ahead”

Thirded!

Not at my store

Well said.

“Let me just say you don’t have to do all that. You don’t even have to know exactly what you think everyone else should do. Some of those are tough decisions! You just have to know what to do yourself.”

“I think that many of us have … gotten stuck imagining that we’re also pundits and politicians and somehow responsible for figuring the whole crisis out and having opinions on each new outrage and who should do what.”

Text reads: The door (immense, heavy, dead-bolted) presented no meaningful impediment. A assign through, I emerged into a magnificent entryway, then ascended a spacious stairwell lined with image after image of my charge: Leaning confidently against a podium, speaking to a tremendous crowd. Squatting with a kaffiyeh-wearing fellow before the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Do you want to address this with George Saunders, @notpodium.bsky.social ?

So foist.

Bo’s Books?

Well if NY booksellers aren’t spilling the tea how are the rest of us gonna know about it?

And still one of the definitive histories of the place

You’re outside your territory but I’ll allow it

Midnight release party, too

Yeah, that’ll be the launch for the Brodernist Book Club

M&D is better, but read AtD because that might incentivize me to finish it, which I never have.

Joan Silber. Ideas of Heaven, Improvement, The Size of the World… Her most recent novel is probably my least favorite, but still good. Also Molly Panter-Downs. And has anybody mentioned Sylvia Townsend-Warner?

The dike trees in Seuss’s The King’s Stilts?

They’re now out in paperback, with two of the original books in each volume.

I take unearned pride that two of your top picks are a St. Louis novel and a Pacific Northwest novel.

Love the map bookmark. Is that the flip side of the other or an entirely different one?