John Self

He’s a real star. Have you read his others? All really good.

And my review of Seascraper:

My review of Love Forms:

Haha, just so.

The authors in question smiling and holding up miniature glazed versions of their covers

I was at the star-studded (Lenny Henry! Charles Dance! Tony Robinson!) Booker Prize last night but forgot to take any photos apart from this one of my table-neighbours Benjamin Wood and Claire Adam with their bespoke book cover cookies. Both fantastic novels.

cinesthetic. @ @TheCinesthetic - 6h Edge of Tomorrow (2014) was sunk by confusing marketing and a forgettable title, yet it turned out to be one of the smartest and most entertaining sci-fi films of the last decade. Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt at their absolute best. 5 cinesthetic. © @TheCinesthetic - 14h What film have you gone into absolutely expecting to hate but that ended up pleasantly surprising you the most? 303 t7 703 • 15K Elon Musk • Great movie 9 98 17 47 0

cinesthetic. @@TheCinesthetic - 1d Man on Fire (2004) sits at 38% on Rotten Tomatoes, proof that critics don't always see the vision. Tony Scott turned vengeance into poetry, and Denzel Washington gave one of his most quietly devastating performances. cinesthetic. • @TheCinesthetic-2d What's your favorite movie with a "rotten" (below 60%) rating on Rotten Tomatoes? © 44к ni 217K 贝 Elon Musk • x 2 @elonmusk - 16m Man on Fire is great! • 64 to 16 • 187

Joyce Carol Oates owned Elon so hard he's spent the last day posting about movies he hasn't seen in 15 years

Hm, still ok for me.

Hot off the press release. My second book is a collection of interviews with Irish writers from Alice Taylor in 1991 to Sebastian Barry, Wendy Erskine, Colum McCann, Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, John Banville, Emma Donoghue and Anna Burns in 2025. Out April from the Lilliput Press

The fact that the BBC has made serious culpable errors does not negate the point that there is a real and concerted right-wing media campaign to destroy it. Both points can be true at the same time and the campaign would not end even if the errors did.

3-panel black and white comic strip. Panel 1. A woman sits in an armchair reading a book. There are shelves full of books either side of her. A voice off-panel says, "You can't survive on books alone." The woman says, "Maybe I can!" Panel 2. The voice says, "How?" The woman replies, "I don't know yet, but I'm sure the answer will be in one of my books." Panel 3. A caption reads: "However". The woman is now a skull, resting on two books on the armchair. The skull says, "I regret nothing!"

Tom Gauld continues to document my life

Congratulations to Ferdia Lennon - first the Everyman Bollinger Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction, and now the Rooney Prize for Literature, for his excellent novel Glorious Exploits. Here’s my review from Jan 2024:

Oh I forgot that! Barnes introduced and chose (but didn’t translate) the recent selection of his diaries published by riverrun.

Glad you liked it!

@john-self.bsky.social thanks for including Iris Wolff’s BLURRED in your roundup from August. Just finished reading it, what a beautiful little gem of a novel. Hope it gets released in the US at some point.

He really is. He’s the one I was happiest to include in the list as I thought he might not be widely known.

I for one will welcome our Chinese overlords #Beerjacket #China #Tsingtao

Exactly, so the BBC didn't need to shoot themselves in the reputation by editing it that way. But they did, and here we are

A bunch of the diaries featured in my article

☝️Includes Jules Renard trying a banana for the first time, Ivan Turgenev not being able to get it up, Oswald Mosley “stretching the cock over three generations” and Samuel Pepys shitting in a chimney (twice). Yes I am a man of simple appetites.

Oh really! That was optimistic! Actually Margaret Atwood talks about that series in her autobiography - basically Jamie Byng charmed her into signing up for it, and because she was the biggest name, they wanted to launch with her. She went off the idea but felt she had to go through with it.

I mean why not add in Allen Bratton’s excellent novel Henry Henry, since we’re here, which was a loose rewrite of Henry IV/V?

Haha, why did they even put the equivalent title at the top?

Shylock is My Name by Howard Jacobson (The Merchant of Venice). Cover shows a red briefcase on a black background

Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler (The Taming of the Shrew). Cover shows a yellow engagement ring on a blue background.

New Boy by Tracy Chevalier (Othello). Cover shows a bunch of brushes upside down in a shallow cylindrical tin, which looks vaguely like a crown if you squint, I guess?

The Porpoise by Mark Haddon (Pericles). Cover shows a blue and green compact fluorescent light bulb on a purple background.

They’ve give the seven existing novels new covers by Michael Craig-Martin, and added two other existing novels that I presume they reckon constitute rewrites of Shakespeare plays too. (Haddon below is new, as is Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies [Romeo and Juliet], not pictured.)

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood (The Tempest). Cover shows a pair of pink handcuffs on an orange background, by Michael Craig-Martin

Dunbar by Edward St Aubyn (King Lear). Cover shows blue school globe on green background by Michael Craig-Martin

The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson (The Winter’s Tale). Cover shows a blue baby’s bottle on a pink background, by Michael Craig-Martin

Macbeth by Jo Nesbo. Cover shows a pink and blue dagger on a yellow background, by Michael Craig-Martin

Anyone remember The Hogarth Shakespeare, a hugely ambitious project announced in 2013 where contemporary authors wrote versions of all of Shakespeare plays, inc Atwood, St Aubyn, Winterson etc - and then it fizzled out after half a dozen?

Well, it’s back! This time as ‘Shakespeare Retold’.

Just remembered that Status Quo are responsible for one of the few LP covers that have ever made me laugh out loud. #GetAGoodGoodDeal

Glad that someone has finally taken responsibility for the appalling assault on democracy that was the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Slightly confused that it's the Director-General of the BBC, but what do I know?

Joyce Carol Oates @Joyce... 17h O So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates— scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend's or relative's accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the "most wealthy person in the world."

Elon Musk ' @elonmusk X.com Oates is a liar and delights in being mean. Not a good human.

lol she got his ass and he knows it

Indeed!

I ran 5km for the second day in a row. Averaging 1,825 kms a year over the past two days.

“Another cuboid volume of journalism” as Amis once put it.

“WHY WOULD ANYONE LOOK INSIDE AN ALIEN EGG??” this is why: