The Earth is Falling

Carmen Pellegrino trans. Shaun Whiteside

last updated: 2026-06-25 21:03:12.453733

ISBN: 978-1-913513-47-4 Edition: Prototype Publishing, 2021 Page count: 226 Blurb: The Earth is Falling is a haunting and magical novel based around the existence of an abandoned village outside Naples. The deserted houses that still stand there are peopled with ghosts who live in a perpetual present from which time has effectively been abolished. The village appears to be semi-alive; the landslide which ominously awaits and which will eventually lead to the abandonment of the place has yet to arrive (yet its rumbles are heard). Pellegrino peoples Alento with eccentrics, luminaries, an eternally optimistic town crier. In the closing pages, the narrator Estella summons  the remaining ghosts for a final dinner. The overall effect is unsettling, haunting and uncanny, the trapped souls doomed to repeat their circumscribed daily life for ever, cut off from the world but dimly aware of its continued presence outside. The pervading mood of nostalgia and melancholy works in stark contrast with the inevitability of the impending catastrophe of the landslide that threatens to obliterate their world forever.  ‘What people: so vibrant and vital, if ghosts can be described as such. What a place: precarious yet utterly certain in Carmen Pellegrino’s vivid, poetic rendering. And what a book: melancholy, elegant, original and in its own particular way, totally seductive.’ – Wendy Erskine ‘Comparisons to Juan Rulfo’s masterpiece Pedro Páramo will be inevitable, but Pellegrino’s “village of the dead” is its own brilliant creature.’ – Marius Kociejowski ‘Pellegrino is perhaps the most gifted prose-writer of her generation.’ – Massimo Onofri, Avvenire ‘an absolutely original and poetic vision’ – Elena Cambiaghi, La Sicilia Carmen Pellegrino is an Italian historian and writer. An eclectic scholar, she has focused her research on collective movements of dissidence, racism, social exclusion and the conditions of exploitation of migrants (including the essay ‘The Hours of my Day’, published in the anthology Qui and Fatigue: Stories, Tales and Reportage from the World of Work, 2010, winner of the Reportage Napoli Monitor award). Co-author of various collective works, in 2011 she co-edited with C. Zagaria the volume Not a Country for Women: Stories of Extraordinary Normality, in which she published an essay on Matilde Sorrentino. Among her most recent central themes of investigation is the study of uninhabited villages and the ruins of ancient settlements, through which she laid the foundations for a science of abandonment as a form of recovering awareness of the historical experience of places. In addition to The Earth is Falling (Cade la terra, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Campiello Prize, Pellegrino is the author of the novels If I Came Back This Evening Next (Se mi tornassi questa sera accanto, 2017) and The Happiness of Others (La felicità degli altri, 2021, also shortlisted for the Campiello prize). Shaun Whiteside is an award-winning translator from Italian, French, German and Dutch. Originally from Northern Ireland, he has translated many works of fiction and non-fiction as well as classical and philosophical texts, notably works by Freud and Nietzsche in Penguin Classics. His translation of To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann won the Sharpe Books HWA Gold Crown for History Writing in 2018 and his translation from the French of Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq was long-listed for the International Man Booker Prize in 2021. His reviews have appeared in the TLS, the New Statesman, Guardian, Observer, Irish Times and the Literary Review.

The Screaming Sky: In pursuit of swifts

Charles Foster

last updated: 2026-06-25 11:59:52.667643

ISBN: 9781915068002 Edition: Little Toller Books, 2021 Page count: 268 Blurb: Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize 2021 ‘Thoughtful, eloquent and beguiling.’ Richard Davenport-Hines, The Oldie ‘Impresses on the page a reverence, an obsession, and eulogises about these tantalisingly high-riding creatures.’ Kirsteen McNish, Caught by the River   Swifts live in perpetual summer. They inhabit the air like nothing on the planet. They defy all our categories and present no passports as they surf the winds across the world. Common swifts are Charles Foster’s joy and obsession. The euphoria of their springtime arrival gives way to such painful bereavement when they depart, that he tries to stay with them as they travel. He catches up with them in Mozambique, over the cliff-tops of southern Spain, and as they mingle with worshippers at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. The Screaming Sky is a radical engagement with the infinite complexity of this endangered species. It steps back, looks to the skies, and stands in awe of these magnificent birds. Illustrated throughout by Jonathan Pomroy.

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

Roger Deakin

last updated: 2026-06-25 11:56:08.564925

ISBN: 9780141039022 Edition: Penguin, 2009 Page count: 320 Blurb: When Roger Deakin died in August 2006, his death was considered by many to be a great loss to literature. Notes From Walnut Tree Farm collects together the jottings, musings and observations with which he filled a series of notebooks for the last six years of his life. In this beautiful illustrated collection, descriptions of walks on Mellis Common and thoughts on the importance of nature sit side by side with memories of the past and musings about literature, while perfectly rendered observations of the tiny, missable visual details of everyday life are skilfully woven with a gentle, wise philosophy. Organised into twelve months of impressions, the notes reveal a passionate but gentle character and his extraordinary, restless curiosity. Capturing Deakin's unique turn of phrase and inspired use of language, and infused throughout with the magically meditative tranquillity of Walnut Tree Farm, this is a charming introduction to one of the most important of modern nature writers, or the perfect follow-up to Wildwood and Waterlog.

Slow Days, Fast Company

Eve Babitz

finished: None

ISBN: 9781681370095 Edition: New York Review of Books, 2016 Page count: 184 Blurb: No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated “its own kind of moral laws,” spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and ’70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note premise. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind–swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success, socialites on three-day drug binges holed up in the Chateau Marmont, soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow’s script will kill them off, Italian femmes fatales even more fatal than Babitz. And she even leaves LA now and then, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf. In the end it doesn’t matter if Babitz ever gets the guy—she seduces us.

Dooneen

Keith Ridgway

finished: None

ISBN: 9781804272459 Edition: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2026 Page count: 328 Blurb: Bartholomew Port, known to all as Mew, steps into the bushes in a London park and steps out of the bushes in a Dublin one. Not only that – there are no cars; there are moving footpaths; there is no church; everything seems quite queer. Mew has arrived in a Dublin that is alive with song, with rumour, with ghosts, and with an unmistakable sense of insurgency. In this suspiciously timeless city that breathes an old revolutionary air, Mew fiercely misses his beloved Mootie, back home in London. An unravelling, an impossibility, a gathering of voices and a single dream, Dooneen is the layered, allusive and wildly original new novel from Keith Ridgway, ‘one of Ireland’s best writers, in a country with no shortage of them’ (The Times). ‘It has an immersive quality that is hard to shake once you’ve emerged – and Ridgway’s line-by-line writing is as good as ever…. But where the book stands out most is Ridgway’s writing about love…. [W]hat Dooneen leaves us with, after its eccentricities and unfathomables, is a simple understanding, as expressed by Philip Larkin – that what will survive of us is love.’
— John Self, The Times ‘When I think of undervalued great writers, Keith Ridgway is one of the first names on my list…. His phrasing is memorable, his imagination extraordinary. He can be eerie, uncomfortable, hilarious, deranged and heartbreaking. Dooneen, which is all those things, takes place in a world like ours…. I found myself admiring its determination to leave the questions it poses unanswered – as well as casting doubt over what those questions could be. Dooneen steps outside consensus reality and goes deep into defamiliarization to convey just how weird and chaotic life feels right now.’
— Chris Power, Observer ‘The powerfully imagined world of Dooneen is a telling testimony not only to Ridgway’s compulsive interest in the possibilities of creative prose but also to the capacity of great writing to bear witness to the corrosive cant of the entitled and the subversive decencies of the maligned.’
— Michael Cronin, Irish Times ‘Comparisons become ridiculous at the level where Ridgway is working, but I will just say that for me there is a sense-memory of Kafka’s The Castle and Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled in my experience of the intimate and dreamlike Dooneen. The feeling is that of seeing fiction’s power of implication stretched before your eyes.’ 
— Jonathan Lethem

 ‘Ridgway has written a near perfect dream – a rebellion against reality, against space and form – but the blood is real, the panic, the love and friendship are there in front of you, can almost be touched. They don’t like you to say “masterpiece” in the endorsements, but read it, and tell me, what else can you call it?’
— Ben Pester, author of The Expansion Project ‘A hugely accomplished, politically acute, and strangely, intensely touching novel. Ridgway shows us – again – how it’s done.’
— Isabel Waidner, author of As If ‘Dooneen is surreal and unsettling, and will subvert your understanding of what time and reality – and even consciousness – is. It is also a poignant love story, and is Beckettian in its melancholy, wit and – most especially – its humanity. Keith Ridgway is a writer whose primary concern is the suffering of others, and his great skill is how quietly and subtly he evokes psychic pain.’
— Mary Costello, author of A Beautiful Loan 

‘Dublin through-and-through but universal, timeless yet punctual to the world right now. Ridgway’s uniquely questioning, epigrammatic voice picks out the personal, the political, the absurd, the deeply serious, strobing away at how to read, how to write, the dangers of narrative and other oppressions, how to find meaning and how to resist, how to live. In this mysterious, miraculous novel Ridgway’s prose has the unarguable lucidity of genius.’ 
— Richard Beard, author of Sad Little Men 

‘Call it Ursula K. Le Guin’s speculative vision in the voice of Samuel Beckett amidst the Dublin housing crisis – or The Repossessed: An Ambiguous Dystopia. A love letter from the end of the world – and to the difficult possibilities after old worlds end.’ 
— So Mayer, author of Bad Language 

‘A strangely transporting fever-dream of a novel.‘ 
— Simon Okotie, author of After Absalon 

‘Dooneen is an engrossing queer-in-all-ways thriller, an insurgent near-future haunting of our present, a vivid reimagining of Dublin, and a love and loss story.’
— David Hayden, author of Darker with the Lights On
 Keith Ridgway is a Dubliner living in London. His novels include A Shock, which won the 2021 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Goldsmith’s Prize; Hawthorn & Child; and Animals. His first novel The Long Falling was filmed by Martin Provost as Où Va La Nuit in 2011. He has been awarded the Prix Fémina Étranger and Premier Roman Étranger, the O Henry award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Dooneen is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and by New Directions.

I‘m Afraid That‘s All We‘ve Got Time For

Jen Calleja

finished: None

Purchased: Topping & Company, Bath UK ISBN: 978-1-9160520-5-5 Edition: Prototype Publishing, 2020 Page count: 192 Blurb: A novelist questions why she’s been shortlisted for the Prize of Prize’s Prize; an artist duo has a messy break up; a schoolgirl is saved from a predator by a flash flood and a gang of dead animals; a surgeon has an incurable identity crisis; a budding actor can’t see what’s so funny; a pregnant food writer gets a craving for luxury consumerism. These thirteen stories by writer and literary translator Jen Calleja pick apart the hidden motivations behind our desires, and the ways we seek out distraction from difficult truths. They investigate histories, power dynamics, rituals, institutions – the roles we adopt, as well as the ones we inherit. Known for her acclaimed poetry and translations, and as a performer in numerous bands, these facets manifest in an attention to the latent ambivalence of language, and the nature of storytelling itself. This writing is direct and considered – it asks to be read, read out loud, retold, refashioned into fables with a distinctive mouthfeel. I’m Afraid that’s All We’ve Got Time For is a sharp, bold, inventive and prescient fictional debut from a versatile and brilliant writer.

Heart Lamp

Banu Mushtaq, trans. Deepa Bhasti

finished: 2026-04-22 00:00:00

Pleasure Beach

Helen Palmer

finished: 2026-03-24 00:00:00

Purchased: She Said, Berlin DE ISBN: 978-1-913513-44-3 Edition: Prototype Publishing, 2023 Page count: 342 Blurb: Pleasure Beach is a queer love story from the North West’s saucy seaside paradise, Blackpool, on one day: 16 June 1999. Written in multiple voices and styles, Pleasure Beach follows the interconnecting journeys and thoughts of three young women over the course of 24 hours and over 18 chapters which are structured and themed in the same way as James Joyce’s Ulysses. Hedonist and wannabe playwright Olga Adessi, 19, is struggling along the prom to get to her morning shift at the chippy with a monstrous hangover, trying to remember exactly what happened with Rachel Watkins, 19, a strange and fragile girl she had an encounter with the night before. Former gymnast and teenage mum Treesa Reynolds, 19, is off to the Sandcastle Waterpark with her mum Lou and daughter Lulu, looking forward to a sausage and egg McMuffin on the way. Pleasure Beach breathes and exhales the unique sea air, fish and chips, donuts and candyfloss scents of Blackpool, bringing to life everything the town is famous for, portraying the gritty magic and sheer unadulterated fun of the city and its people across a spectrum of sensory experiences and emotions.  ‘Pleasure Beach is the alcopop-soaked, stylistically promiscuous Y2K queer seaside teenage experimental novel you never knew you needed – with its chorus of voices ranging from Jacques Lacan to the Vengaboys and an impossibly sweet central romance, it is funny, sexy, class-conscious and, as they used to say, intensely intense.’ – Owen Hatherley

Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

finished: 2026-03-06 21:36:35.685322

Purchased: Zabriskie, Berlin DE ISBN: 9781916751354 Edition: And Other Stories, 2025 Page count: 350 Blurb: Shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award Akiwenzii is the old man and their will. Ninaatig is the maple tree; they are their lungs. Mindimooyenh is the old woman who holds it all together; she is their conscience. Sabe, the honest sasquatch, is the marrow in their bones. Adik is the caribou and their nervous system. Asin, human, is their eyes and ears; Lucy, human, their mind. Together they are Mashkawaji, our narrator, who may be frozen stiff but still remembers a time of connection everywhere. When Mashkawaji’s parts attempt to commune with the world around them, they find it’s a strange place, full of SpongeBob Band-Aids and branded coffee mugs. Exposing the unnatural solitude at the heart of settler-capitalism and fully grounded in Indigenous ways of being, Noopiming offers a moving and wickedly funny vision of what modern togetherness might look like – even as it breaks open the self to a world still alive with people, animals, ancestors, and spirits.

Notes from the Ginza Shihodo Stationery Shop

Kenji Ueda, trans. Emily Balistrieri

finished: 2026-08-01 22:00:00

hello, world?

Anna Poletti

finished: 2026-02-02 21:48:37.832155

Purchased: rile books, Brussels ISBN: 978-1-63590-229-7 Edition: Semiotext(e), 2024 Page count: 374 Blurb: Seasonal begins writing sentences and thinking thoughts they never thought possible. They want to give László the pleasure of being nothing. The more they come to like him, to value his sensitivity, his sharp mind, his aesthetics, his ethics, and the more they want his respect, the easier it seems to become to think about destroying him. A new set of capacities which they had only dimly sensed are now coursing in their muscles, their cunt, their blood, their mind. Abandoned by their Dutch partner after giving up their home and their job to follow him to the Netherlands, humanities scholar Seasonal finds themself single in a strange place for the first time in a decade. Dipping into the rabbit hole of digital eroticism, Seasonal soon meets László, a male sub who volleys back their cerebral sexts and is seeking a dominant guide. His dating-app profile—a photo of Foucault and the ingenuous greeting “Hello, World?”—thinly veils his desire to be annihilated. It's a desire that Seasonal senses they can fulfill. But to do this means crossing the frightening gap between their desires and capacities. Seasonal and László embark on an experiment in remaking intimacy outside the Republic of Gender. But as it continues, the two realize they are staging separate confrontations with domination: Seasonal finds they must confront their own relation to the violence and anger that marked their upbringing in working-class, small-town Australia, while László stages his own confrontation with his decision to leave Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. As they attempt to improvise a theater of domination that opens up possibilities of reciprocity, the energies of their sexuality stalk this collaboration, threatening to give them exactly what they bargained or begged for. A feminist paean to perversity in the tradition of Pauline Réage’s Story of O and Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus, Anna Poletti's hello, world? dares to fully inhabit female power, and to fully face the violence, beauty, and uncharted territories of human sexuality. “hello, world? is a stunning achievement that tells an electrifying story about the enigma of desire and surrender. In riveting and dynamic prose, Poletti takes us on a journey through the bewildering dynamics of sexuality and otherness, showing us a whole new world that beckons us to say hello.” —Dr. Gila Ashtor, Columbia University, author of Homo Psyche and Masochism: A Contemporary Introduction “hello, world? starts with that all too familiar scenario of uprooting one's life for a partner only to be let down by them. What Seasonal does then might also be familiar to many—they go on the apps, fuck around, find out. What they find are ways of engaging intimately with others that become experiments in the relation between the body and the body-politic under what we commonly call late capitalism and might wish to call late patriarchy. The violence of both call for forms of enactment, of selves in relation, that can provide some kind of figure for them, some way of figuring them out. The delight in this book is not just in how closely observed and felt these things are, but how closely thought as well.” —McKenzie Wark, author of Reverse Cowgirl

The Cost of Living

Deborah Levy

finished: 2026-01-25 12:18:16.292926

Things I Don‘t Want to Know

Deborah Levy

finished: 2026-01-17 23:42:15.428885

Girlbeast

Cecilie Lind, Hazel Evans trans.

finished: 2026-01-04 15:29:21.064720

Information Age

Cora Lewis

finished: 2026-01-04 15:28:10.654403

New Paltz, New Paltz

Mike Powell

finished: 2026-01-04 15:27:23.219589

Real Estate

Deborah Levy

finished: 2026-01-04 15:26:55.311153

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

finished: 2026-01-01 22:30:23.860967

LOTE

Shola von Reinhold

finished: 2025-12-07 23:00:00

Purchased from: She Said — Berlin, Germany Edition: Paperback, Jacaranda Books (2020) ISBN: 9781913090111 Blurb: „Lush and frothy, incisive and witty, Shola von Reinhold's decadent queer literary debut immerses readers in the pursuit of aesthetics and beauty, while interrogating the removal and obscurement of Black figures from history. Solitary Mathilda has long been enamored with the 'Bright Young Things' of the 20s, and throughout her life, her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things that she adores, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists' residency in Dun, a small European town Hermia was known to have lived in during the 30s. The artists' residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination, but will she be able to break the thrall of her Transfixions?“

Happy All The Time

Laurie Colwin

finished: 2025-04-08 17:31:20.317757

Briefly Very Beautiful

Roz Dineen

finished: 2025-02-07 17:54:41.689949

The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker

Jack Skelley

finished: 2024-07-03 22:00:00

Edition: 2023 Semiotext(e) ISBN: 978-1-63590-185-6

Glory

NoViolet Bulawayo

finished: 2024-07-29 00:00:00

Sinkhole: Three Crimes

Rosanna McLaughlin

finished: 2024-05-06 22:00:00