Nina, thank you for doing this. If you email me your address, I'll put a check in the mail. I am so old school I'm back to writing with a fountain pen. In a reporter's notebook :-) Very happy to read NELN sallycragin at gmail
Thanks for the news - still so sad about Danielle Legros Georges (but yay, Lloyd!). As for my own reading: I'm about a quarter of the way into Lucas Schaefer's "The Slip." Loved it at first - reminded me very much of James McBride. Now I'm tiring of its shaggy dog qualities, but I'll stick with it.
Thanks for the news of Danielle Legros Georges's new chapbook (and the great Craig Bailey photo!). She was a beautiful poet and a vital member of this community..... As for Bolaño's "2666," I remember a friend of mine years ago saying he was reading it and "after the 200th woman found mutilated and murdered by the side of the road you start to feel crazy." I'm impressed you could get through it and found it rewarding!.... I just finished reading "Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses," by musician (and Boston resident!) Peter Wolf. Highly recommended -- Wolf has met and befriended many writers over the years. . . . I am now undertaking a comparative reading of Edith Wharton's "The Portrait" and Henry James's "The Story of a Masterpiece" -- stories about paintings by two long-time Massachusetts residents -- though both stories are set in New York (harumph!). Question: Who was the better novelist, Wharton or her friend Henry? Discuss.
The murder and mutilation is nearly unbearable, but I was so taken with the seethe of the project over all. And good to know you were into Peter Wolf's book! It's always neat spotting him around town. And sigh, Wharton and James, that's stuff I've been steering clear of since college, but I like this comparative project you've got cooking!
JUST finished it so very fresh.. pressed into my hands by my great friend Maude who is rarely ever wrong.. but it will indeed stay and live inside me .
I was absorbed and unsettled reading Deni Ellis Béchard’s We are Dreams in the Eternal Machine (Milkweed, 2025). I read novels in bed before going to sleep, and I would often, as I closed the book for the night, say to my wife that I did not know what I was feeling about it. Yet, I found myself recommending it often enough to friends and colleagues that it wound up on my wife’s bedstand among her “next to read” pile of books.
I want to invite people into the experience of reading the book, so don’t want to give away too much plot. It is a speculative/science fiction work set in a dystopian future that is explicitly extrapolated from this historical moment. It is a plausible future world, given the contemporary resurgence of authoritarianism in a deeply polarized society, the human species incapable of addressing its role in accelerating environmental destruction, and the emergence of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. These themes converge in a story of Partition in a polarized United States following fascist seizure of state power, and the emergence of an autonomous, mechanized generative artificial intelligence which, in a fascinating variation on the Asimov theme of a Prime Directive, protects us human beings from harm. It follows the lives of number of compelling characters living on either side of the Partition, all of whom become absorbed into the world orchestrated by our benign AI protector.
I was trouble by how easily I resonated with the characters being absorbed into a world that protected against self-destruction by our species. I allowed myself to feel comforted by images of an artificial world, which (as an ironic consequence of the literalism of its prime directive) would not allow human beings to die. I came to my senses as I followed the characters’ lives over centuries and remembered what it is to be mortal. I remembered, to use a phrase attributed to Teilhard de Jardin, that I am “a spiritual being living a human life.”
I was absorbed and unsettled reading Deni Ellis Béchard’s We are Dreams in the Eternal Machine (Milkweed, 2025). I read novels in bed before going to sleep, and I would often, as I closed the book for the night, say to my wife that I did not know what I was feeling about it. Yet, I found myself recommending it often enough to friends and colleagues that it wound up on my wife’s bedstand among her “next to read” pile of books.
I want to invite people into the experience of reading the book, so don’t want to give away too much plot. It is a speculative/science fiction work set in a dystopian future that is explicitly extrapolated from this historical moment. It is a plausible future world, given the contemporary resurgence of authoritarianism in a deeply polarized society, the human species incapable of addressing its role in accelerating environmental destruction, and the emergence of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. These themes converge in a story of Partition in a polarized United States following fascist seizure of state power, and the emergence of an autonomous, mechanized generative artificial intelligence which, in a fascinating variation on the Asimov theme of a Prime Directive, protects us human beings from harm. It follows the lives of number of compelling characters living on either side of the Partition, all of whom become absorbed into the world orchestrated by our benign AI protector.
I was trouble by how easily I resonated with the characters being absorbed into a world that protected against self-destruction by our species. I allowed myself to feel comforted by images of an artificial world, which (as an ironic consequence of the literalism of its prime directive) would not allow human beings to die. I came to my senses as I followed the characters’ lives over centuries and remembered what it is to be mortal. I remembered, to use a phrase attributed to Teilhard de Jardin, that I am “a spiritual being living a human life.”
Nina, thank you for doing this. If you email me your address, I'll put a check in the mail. I am so old school I'm back to writing with a fountain pen. In a reporter's notebook :-) Very happy to read NELN sallycragin at gmail
Sally, you are so, so kind! Thank you so much for reading, and I'll drop you an email now!
Thanks for the news - still so sad about Danielle Legros Georges (but yay, Lloyd!). As for my own reading: I'm about a quarter of the way into Lucas Schaefer's "The Slip." Loved it at first - reminded me very much of James McBride. Now I'm tiring of its shaggy dog qualities, but I'll stick with it.
Are you a read-till-the-end-no-matter-what reader, Clea? I discard so quickly if something's not landing!
Thanks for the news of Danielle Legros Georges's new chapbook (and the great Craig Bailey photo!). She was a beautiful poet and a vital member of this community..... As for Bolaño's "2666," I remember a friend of mine years ago saying he was reading it and "after the 200th woman found mutilated and murdered by the side of the road you start to feel crazy." I'm impressed you could get through it and found it rewarding!.... I just finished reading "Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses," by musician (and Boston resident!) Peter Wolf. Highly recommended -- Wolf has met and befriended many writers over the years. . . . I am now undertaking a comparative reading of Edith Wharton's "The Portrait" and Henry James's "The Story of a Masterpiece" -- stories about paintings by two long-time Massachusetts residents -- though both stories are set in New York (harumph!). Question: Who was the better novelist, Wharton or her friend Henry? Discuss.
The murder and mutilation is nearly unbearable, but I was so taken with the seethe of the project over all. And good to know you were into Peter Wolf's book! It's always neat spotting him around town. And sigh, Wharton and James, that's stuff I've been steering clear of since college, but I like this comparative project you've got cooking!
Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton … I learned a word! Leveret .. and now I can’t stop thinking it…. Or of the hare.. fantastic
Ah, I've seen that book around, so good to know it keeps living inside you, Kate!
JUST finished it so very fresh.. pressed into my hands by my great friend Maude who is rarely ever wrong.. but it will indeed stay and live inside me .
I was absorbed and unsettled reading Deni Ellis Béchard’s We are Dreams in the Eternal Machine (Milkweed, 2025). I read novels in bed before going to sleep, and I would often, as I closed the book for the night, say to my wife that I did not know what I was feeling about it. Yet, I found myself recommending it often enough to friends and colleagues that it wound up on my wife’s bedstand among her “next to read” pile of books.
I want to invite people into the experience of reading the book, so don’t want to give away too much plot. It is a speculative/science fiction work set in a dystopian future that is explicitly extrapolated from this historical moment. It is a plausible future world, given the contemporary resurgence of authoritarianism in a deeply polarized society, the human species incapable of addressing its role in accelerating environmental destruction, and the emergence of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. These themes converge in a story of Partition in a polarized United States following fascist seizure of state power, and the emergence of an autonomous, mechanized generative artificial intelligence which, in a fascinating variation on the Asimov theme of a Prime Directive, protects us human beings from harm. It follows the lives of number of compelling characters living on either side of the Partition, all of whom become absorbed into the world orchestrated by our benign AI protector.
I was trouble by how easily I resonated with the characters being absorbed into a world that protected against self-destruction by our species. I allowed myself to feel comforted by images of an artificial world, which (as an ironic consequence of the literalism of its prime directive) would not allow human beings to die. I came to my senses as I followed the characters’ lives over centuries and remembered what it is to be mortal. I remembered, to use a phrase attributed to Teilhard de Jardin, that I am “a spiritual being living a human life.”
I was absorbed and unsettled reading Deni Ellis Béchard’s We are Dreams in the Eternal Machine (Milkweed, 2025). I read novels in bed before going to sleep, and I would often, as I closed the book for the night, say to my wife that I did not know what I was feeling about it. Yet, I found myself recommending it often enough to friends and colleagues that it wound up on my wife’s bedstand among her “next to read” pile of books.
I want to invite people into the experience of reading the book, so don’t want to give away too much plot. It is a speculative/science fiction work set in a dystopian future that is explicitly extrapolated from this historical moment. It is a plausible future world, given the contemporary resurgence of authoritarianism in a deeply polarized society, the human species incapable of addressing its role in accelerating environmental destruction, and the emergence of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. These themes converge in a story of Partition in a polarized United States following fascist seizure of state power, and the emergence of an autonomous, mechanized generative artificial intelligence which, in a fascinating variation on the Asimov theme of a Prime Directive, protects us human beings from harm. It follows the lives of number of compelling characters living on either side of the Partition, all of whom become absorbed into the world orchestrated by our benign AI protector.
I was trouble by how easily I resonated with the characters being absorbed into a world that protected against self-destruction by our species. I allowed myself to feel comforted by images of an artificial world, which (as an ironic consequence of the literalism of its prime directive) would not allow human beings to die. I came to my senses as I followed the characters’ lives over centuries and remembered what it is to be mortal. I remembered, to use a phrase attributed to Teilhard de Jardin, that I am “a spiritual being living a human life.”