Dan Sinykin

This is great. One of the things we should be teaching is "taste" and "discernment." This used to not be unusual. I have an experience in The Writer's Practice that's a "passion argument" where students have to convince the audience to do something (like read a particular book). I used it often.

the one i read in 2000

Not too many books more deserving of the kind of heater this book is on right now with the year-end lists.

Unwanted Reading: A Review of Tom Comitta’s ‘People’s Choice Literature’ The Sunday before I taught Beloved last spring, I sat on my couch wondering how I was going to convince a room full of second semester seniors that, before they left high school that June, they sho…

Had a lot of fun writing this review of @tomcomitta.bsky.social’s strange, moving, and hilarious book. Gets us to think, as I argue here, about the value of an aesthetic education—something we all should aim for as we teach our kids.

mid-theory.com/2025/12/04/u...

UNL professors march through campus in New Orleans-style 'funeral' to protest proposed budget cuts Students, alumni, faculty and community members came together to protest the $27.5 million in budget cuts.

art is for everybody, language is for everybody, ideas are for everybody, including nebraskans

www.klkntv.com/unl-professo...

He never sleeps, Toronyan. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

i wonder where anyone got the idea to call zionists colonizers

could it be from their conference in 1899 voting to publicly declare their intention to colonize the holy land? their language not mine.

Co-writing this was a very rewarding experience. If anyone hasn't had a chance to read these stories by Jamil Jan Kochai, I'd urge you to do so!

Friends, @keeblearin.bsky.social and I have a new essay out at ASAP/Review about @jamiljankochai.bsky.social's "The Haunting of Hajji Hotak." It was a pleasure to work with Arin and with @davidhering.bsky.social and @emmywaldman.bsky.social!

asapjournal.com/node/jamil-j...

“Not So Ephemeral After All”: Talking Op-Eds, War, and Memory with Bécquer Seguín - Public Books “Why does the op-ed still hold sway over writers who want to be intellectuals or want to have some public presence?”

“Muñoz Molina has what we might call a hypermoral sensibility, which drives his newspaper writing and, I argue, simultaneously drives his novel writing.”

New at PB: @becquer.bsky.social on the novelists who became Spain’s premiere op-ed columnists.

“The labor is unsustainable and we have to do something to break the cycle of burn out.” 😮‍💨

We really need to talk more about fundraising in small press and university press publishing *as* fundraising — ie a job duty — and as a labor issue not just a revenue stream or potential constraint on the product

Thank you for doing this interview, which I'm now eager to read, and will imminently. If only UK small presses could get a similar boost as U.S. small presses just did (or soon will) from the $50 million Mellon-led nonprofit literary fund....

Life-Giving, Imaginative and Underfunded: Small Press Publishers in Crisis A recent letter co-written and signed by small press publishers has highlighted the significant pressures they face, threatening them with closure and potentially damaging the literary ecosystem ir…

Up now on @literaryhub.bsky.social; an in-depth interview with small press publishers on what they do and how they do it, how they differ from commercial publishing in content & form, on funding, their impact on literary communities, & some excellent book recommends🎄

lithub.com/life-giving-...

This list of the best bookstores in Dallas is so beautiful, our city has grown so much in the past decade into a city with bookstores to match our incredibly diverse & engaged reading citizenry! So grateful our own little @deepvellumbooks.bsky.social is included! #LiteraryDallas forever!

D.A. Miller's JANE AUSTEN, OR, THE SECRET OF STYLE, is a perfect single-author monograph

Humans Are Nature’s Eccentrics—Laughing and Crying Show Why - Public Books Remarkably, the acts of laughing and crying reveal there are no givens for individual behavior nor blueprints for human society.

Loved this. And made me wonder whether you know Helmuth Plessner's LAUGHING AND CRYING? www.publicbooks.org/humans-are-n...

Easter is too commercialized now adays. I liked it better when it was just about killing a dude and hiding the body in a cave

say what you will about quentin tarantino, he's right that toy story 3 is one of the best films of the twenty-first century

Breaking It Down: PW Talks with Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant In Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press), coeditors and English professors Sinykin and Winant seek to redefine the technique as a way to make and understand…

In Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press), coeditors and English professors Sinykin and Winant seek to redefine the technique as a way to make and understand arguments, with uses beyond literary studies.

Elite media could publish on CUNY or UMBC and not even have to leave town.

A couple weeks ago we got a lovely note from someone on the other side of the country thanking us profusely for ILLing a book to them. Curious, we looked up the book they borrowed.

It would have cost $1,200 for them to purchase it.

ILL is one of the things I love most about libraries.

Article title: The NYT wrote more about Harvard last year than all community colleges combined

I posted three main figure from the article below

www.vox.com/2014/7/23/59...

"Wife missing a shoe? Hemorrhoids treated here."

This sign raises more questions than it answers

"What work is that detail doing?" is one of the best questions I learned to ask (thank you, Juliana Spahr!) during my MFA in poetry and it has served me well beyond belief as both an artist and political ecologist. 🌱

Around this time of the year I tend to get gloomy and frustrated about the conditions around my work, how it's valued, etc etc.

i always need to remind myself that the work itself...the work itself is so so important.

what a lovely piece of work this is.

Terrific essay on close reading away from elite spaces by @johannawinant.bsky.social

The Claims of Close Reading - Boston Review Literary studies have been starved by austerity, but their core methodology remains radical.

"The years I taught . . . were scarred by despair, but I never despaired about my students, who, when our conditions allowed it, showed me again and again how close reading requires and multiplies both trust and strength." YES. @johannawinant.bsky.social at @bostonreview.bsky.social

Prof Elaine Auyoung contributed to Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century ("The Drama of Comparison: Alex Woloch on Jane Austen"):

Our EIC, @kristenmiller.bsky.social, in today’s Kentucky Lantern 🔥🔥🔥