In loose order of reading. This year I made a vow to not let work ‘get in the way’ of reading. I was talking to a colleague about how every subject/specialism has one thing they are supposed to be really good at and actually kind of suck at. We agreed English & Creative Writing staff are often pretty bad at this thing that should be their lifeblood: reading. To prioritise reading is to affirm the necessity of thinking. I felt so burned out with the circuitry of the 2010s and the zoomageddon of lockdown, all those screens. Reading in scroll-time. I still love reading in scroll-time, but on the move only. Or in the midst of something else doing. It took me three years to get back into immersive, situated, FOCUSED reading again. I mean staying up all night to finish a book, crying at sentences, holding something to the light and putting it down and stopping and starting because you want to savour something and all the world of it following you into dreams. All reading started to plug into work. Good work. Channels. If I’m honest, I haven’t written a lot this year. I needed a break from concepts. I did a lot of editing and proofing and reading. I wrote a lot of emails and did a LOT of marking. I think of marking as writing time. It eats into writing time but it’s also a practice of sentence-making, observation, editing, rewriting. Eileen Myles says somewhere that when they write people recommendation letters and do interviews etc that’s a form of writing. So really there are very few ‘fallow’ periods. You’re always writing something to someone, for something or not. I have written over a monograph’s worth of student feedback this year, maybe more. Each paragraph of feedback is a micro-essay, a snapshot of orientation, a patchwork sample which stitches multiple discourses (genre, criteria, instinct, history) in ascent to encouragement and improvement. So all that feedback, I’m trying to say, means I also read a hell of a lot of student work. Hundreds of scripts. Marking trains my eye as a reader and writer. Still learning to toggle between different kinds of reading. Refusing the active/passive binary in favour of a continuum of generative involvement. A lot of what I read below was in-between other reading, but some of it is more explicitly ‘work’ reading. Or: reading as a way of connecting with friends, colleagues — their beautiful brains. Or: preparation for something as yet unknown. Working through personal syllabi. Refreshing the palette.
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Robert Glück, About Ed (2023)
Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say…, trans. by Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (2006)
Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness, trans. by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie, Sebastian Truskolaski, Antonia Grousdanidou (2023)
Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless, trans. by Penny Hueston (2021/2023)
Joey Frances, Takeaway Night (2024)
Teju Cole, Black Paper (2021)
George Saunders, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain (2021)
Megan Ridgeway, The Magpie (2024)
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. by John E. Woods (1924)
Andrew O’Hagan, Mayflies (2021)
Tabitha Lasley, Sea State (2021)
Zadie Smith, Intimations (2020)
Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. by Barbara Bray (1986)
Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992)
Oli Hazzard, Sleepers Awake (2024)
Courtney Bush, Every Book is About the Same Thing (2021)
Hélène Cixous, Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time, trans. by Beverley Bie Brahic (2016)
McKenzie Wark, Raving (2023)
Rachael Allen, God Complex (2024)
Elle Nash, Deliver Me (2024)
Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus (2021)
Andrew Meehan, Instant Fires (2022)
Michael Eigen, Ecstasy (2001)
Noah Ross, The Dogs (2024)
Jennifer Soong, Comeback Death (2024)
Barbara Browning, The Gift (2017)
Cynthia Cruz, The Melancholia of Class (2021)
Courtney Bush, I Love Information (2023)
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (1977)
Barbara Browning, The Correspondence Artist (2011)
Hilary White, Holes (2024)
Laynie Browne, Everyone and Her Resemblances (2024)
Deborah Meadows, Representing Absence (2004)
Holly Pester, The Lodger (2024)
Terese Marie Mailhot, Heartberries (2018)
Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band (2015)
Lauren Levin, Nightwork (2021)
Oddný Eir, Land of Love and Ruins, trans. by Philip Roughton (2016)
Danielle Dutton, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other (2024)
Elvia Wilk, Oval (2019)
Nisha Ramayya, Fantasia (2024)
Joanne Kyger, On Time (2015)
Jean Day, Late Human (2021)
Lisa Jarnot, Black Dog Songs (2003)
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1980)
Mariana Enriquez, Things We Lost in the Fire (2016)
Ben Smith, Doggerland (2019)
Ricky Monaghan Brown, Terminal (2024)
Wendy Lotterman, A Reaction to Someone Coming In (2023)
Joseph Mosconi, Fright Catalog (2013)
Tao Lin, Taipei (2013)
Haytham El Wardany, The Book of Sleep, trans. by Robin Moger (2020)
Lucy Ives, Life is Everywhere (2022)
Maria Hardin, Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether (2024)
Brian Whitener, The 90s (2022)
Jamie Bunyor, A stone worn smooth (2022)
Lucy Ives, The Hermit (2016)
Brenda Hillman, Cascadia (2001)
Bhanu Kapil, Incubation: a space for monsters (2006)
Peter Reich, A Book of Dreams (1973)
Steve Orth, The Life and Times of Steve Orth (2020)
Lindsey Boldt, Weirding (2022)
Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T. (1970)
Hannah Levine, Greasepaint (2024)
Joe Luna, Old News (2024)
Maggie O’Sullivan, earth (2024)
Ian Macartney, sun-drunk (2024)
Sébastien Bovie, Longing for Lo-fi: Glimpsing back through technology (2023)
Steven Zultanski, Relief (2021)
Lionel Ruffel, I Can’t Sleep. trans. by Claire Finch (2021)
Noémi Lefebvre, The Poetics of Work, trans. by Sophie Lewis (2021)
Cynthia Cruz, Disquieting: Essays on Silence (2019)
Marie Buck and Matthew Walker, Spoilers (2024)
Ed Steck, David Horvitz Newly Found Bas Jan Ader Film (2021)
Ammiel Alcalay and Joanne Kyger, Joanne Kyger: Letters to & From (2012)
Lyn Hejinian, Fall Creek (2024)
Etel Adnan and Laure Adler, The Beauty of Light: Interviews, trans. by Ethan Mitchell (2024)
Rick Emerson, Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries (2022)
Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott, Decomp (2013)
Miye Lee, Dallergut Dream Department Store, trans. by Sandy Joosun Lee (2023)
Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, The Grand Piano: Part 1 (2006/2010)
Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)
Ian Macartney, Darksong (2024)
Chris Tysh, Continuity Girl (2000)
Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, The Grand Piano: Part 2 (2007/2017)
Andrew Durbin, Mature Themes (2014)
Johanne Lykke Holm, Strega, trans. by Saskia Vogel (2022)
Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (1985)
Robin Blaser, The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser (2006)
Daniel Feinberg, Some Sun (2024)
Maria Hardin, Sick Story (2022)
Lieke Marsman, The Opposite of a Person, trans. by Sophie Collins (2022)
Nadia de Vries, Thistle, trans. by Sarah Timmer Harvey (2024)
Rodge Glass, Joshua in the Sky: A Blood Memoir (2024)
Sarah Moss, My Good Bright Wolf (2024)
Giovanbattista Tusa, Terra Cosmica (2024)
Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, Poor Artists (2024)
Andrew Meehan, Best Friends (2025)
Courtney Bush, Isn’t this Nice? (2019)
Meghann Boltz, Cautionary Tale (2021)
Ariana Reines, Wave of Blood (2024)
Dalia Neis, The Swarm (2022)
Ian Macartney, Secret Agent Orca Twelve (2024)
Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (1988)
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (1963)
Molly Brodak, A Little Middle of the Night (2010)
Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day (1982)
Anna Kavan, Ice (1967)
Molly Brodak, Bandit (2016)
Charles Bernstein, Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (1986)
Anna Gurton-Wachter, My Midwinter Poem (2020)
mariaology 