Wonderful opening to a new series by the only banana worth reading. So many young girls nowadays aspire to be witches, but they're doing it wrong! ("Witches have no wit, said the magician who was weak. Hula, hula, said the witches." - Norman Mailer) carcinisation.com/2025/11/20…

Brutal. The irony is that this is a lapidary example of the kind of "scathing" criticism that bad readers lazily imagine to have been Oyler's métier. bookforum.com/print/3004/lau…

My apologies to anyone who's been trying to reach me. I've been dealing with a cluster of home maintenance issues. The good news is that the power's back on, and most orders are either in transit or scheduled for shipment. Your patience is appreciated.

Meg McCarville's DADDY STORIES will be released by 9BB on June 16 and I'm pretty sure some of you are going to love it. For a taste, check out this free chapter-story on the @AmpSulphate Substack: amphetaminesulphate.substack…

Meg McCarville's madly entertaining memoir DADDY STORIES will be formally released on Father's Day and is now available for pre-order through 9BB. Some of you are going to love this one. I do. ninebandedbooks.com/shop/fut…

Time to look up "nepenthe"...

If you have difficulty sleeping (as I have throughout my life), a trick I recommend is to vividly imagine a series of people (friends, celebrities, family, etc.) calmly and sequentially expressing variants of "you need some rest." Similar to counting sheep, but more effective.

This novel, INCEL, I think it's good. In some ways, it's very much what I was expecting; then, at turns, it twists against expectation, and I'm usually impressed. There's humor and tristesse and stark interiority and tightrope daring, and it's worth reading. If you like reading.

There is no afterlife.

Now that I'm mostly on the mend, I thought I'd share this lovely image of my recent foot injury. Once it's fully healed, I am resolved to get a proper pedicure.

Here's a working cover tease for Meg McCarville's outrageous, hilarious, and disarmingly poignant memoir about her wild and wily father. Some of you are going to love this book as much as I do, pretty sure. It'll be released by 9BB in June.

I read this in an earlier edition. It's good.

Current book rotation. Gardner's book is one that I've long been aware of and it's fun to read the 1952 edition from a "future man" armchair.

Hear! Hear! The academic pricing model that may have been somewhat justifiable for scaled traditional print runs makes no sense with current printing tech (and not just PoD). It's a sham that only keeps books from being read.

Just read "The Fun Stuff," James Wood's essay about Keith Moon's genius. I've never had more than a rudimentary appreciation for music, but everything Wood says meshes with my adolescent appreciation. The text is worth reading (or revisiting), please. See: newyorker.com/magazine/2010/…

Sure, we might expect the American sniffer of EU penis to react with homicidal rage, but notice how the old "I dislike the smell of this man's penis and must kill him" trope is here complicated (subverted?) by the assailant's tearful sobbing. The future of political cartooning.