Terry Pitts (Vertigo)

I've created a new, ongoing, annotated bibliography of and about redacted poetry of all kinds. (And there are o-so-many ways to redact words!) It has links that let you see pages from most of the poetry titles. Even a few redacted novels snuck in. sebald.wordpress.com/redacted-the...

Richard Siken “Where was he, the one who remembered who I was?” – from “Doubt” Richard Siken is out to make a statement with his new book. Even without an exclamation mark, the book…

Richard Siken is out to make a statement with his new book "I Do Know Something." The poems are written in tight rectangular text blocks that afford the reader no way in or out, no enjambments to ponder, just Siken’s singular, captivating voice. sebald.wordpress.com/2026/01/12/r...

Three books blew me away this year: John Trefry’s prose fiction Plats, Richard Siken’s brand new volume of poetry I Do Know Something, and Martha A. Sandweiss’s non-fiction The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/12/23/n...

Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital” and The Planet Shaped By Want “A small thing is a big thing seen from afar, a big thing is a small thing seen up close.” I’ve taken this quote from Samantha Harvey’s 2018 novel The Western Wind, but it f…

"The hand of politics is so visible from their vantage point that they don’t know how they could have missed it at first." In Samantha Harvey's novel "Orbital," the astronauts in the space station finally see that he entire Earth is shaped by want and greed. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/12/08/s...

Want a novel on the challenging side with an independent voice? Caleb Klaces, Mr. Outside (Prototype Press) or Rebecca Grandsen, Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group (Tangerine Press). Mr. Outside comes with photos. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/11/13/r...

In his novel "Tomás Nevinson," Javier Marías describes the expressions on the faces of people in a photograph shown on the next page. The idea of reading faces like this gets its public scientific stamp of approval from Charles Darwin in 1872. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/11/03/t...

What the Picture Knows: Books That Seamlessly Blend Text and Image According to linguist David Crystal, once a person has learned to read, it is almost impossible to process the graphic marks that make up a letter as anything but a letter. At some point, we stop l…

A brilliant article by Caleb Klaces on the often overlooked role of photographs in fiction, thinking 'about what the picture “knows” that the words do not.'

lithub.com/what-the-pic...

“Walter Abish should be on every bookshelf in these times,” she sighs to her dog Radu.

Transiting Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus At first, there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you. Shirley Hazzard’s novel The Transit of Venus (1980) is a novel I have looked forward to rereading for a lo…

Making the wrong choice is the way characters are tested in Shirley Hazzard’s universe. In her 1980 novel The Transit of Venus, she puts unbearable pressure on marriages & affairs to see if anyone has an ethical spine. Absolutely great reading. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/09/15/t...

Giorgio Agamben’s “Self-Portrait in the Studio” is utterly fascinating in so many ways. He uses his study as the locus for an intellectual memoir tracing the people, books & places that have been important to his thinking. Great photographs throughout.

Mathias Énard's "Tell Them of Battles, Kings & Elephants" is not his best, but very readable. However, vol. 2 of Yoko Tawada's trilogy, "Suggested in the Stars" is mostly forgettable. It feels like she's lost her way. As they say on the news, details at: sebald.wordpress.com/2025/08/11/r...

I wrote on 2 novels I mostly liked: Mathias Énard's The Deserters & Yoko Tawada's Scattered All Over the Earth. Enard's book is about the brutal & the elite; Tawada's subtle, almost cartoony novel is about language & climate change. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/07/24/r...

The Two Nadjas André Breton’s Nadja is one of the cornerstone novels of French Surrealism. Published in 1928, the narrator, Breton himself, tells the story of meeting a woman on the streets of Paris and fin…

There's a new edition of Andre Breton's Nadja out now by NYRB. I'm not up to comparing the new translation by Mark Polizzotti with Richard Howard's, but there are some good reasons to spring for the new edition, even though my heart loves the old Grove edition. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/07/02/t...

Sebald’s Shadows of Reality To photograph is to be profligate. I have thousands of digital images of my family and travels scattered across several cloud storage sites, my Flickr account, my hard drive, and a thumb drive. And…

I'm really impressed with Shadows of Reality: A Catalogue of W.G. Sebald’s Photographic Materials. I gave it a good shakedown & decided it's an impressive research tool that's equally fun to browse though. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/06/13/s...

Such a great author photo. Peter Handke playing Foosball on the rear jacket of Short Letter, Long Farewell (FSG, 1974). US first edition.

“The composition cedes to disorder”: John Trefry’s Novel “Plats” Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1955. Art Institute of Chicago Every moment is an interchangeable plat of stained irrelevent objects, and exits in guilt, emptiness, or the next plat. The end is useles…

I dove into John Trefry's nearly abstract novel Plats and resurfaced with a few things to say. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/04/21/t... Plats summons the reader to conjure up images and situations that can only be constructed in the mind, to use the infinite plasticity of our own imaginative processes.

Sylee Gore's first book "Maximum Summer" (Nion Editions) gives us short, intimate, sometimes visceral poems about the first few months of the poet with her new child. The poems are arranged on the page like snapshots in an album. No photographs necessary.

Second half of my long review of W.G. Sebald's book of essays on Austrian literature Silent Catastrophes, translated by the terrific Jo Catling, is up now. Get the book! It's affordable! sebald.wordpress.com/2025/04/04/s...

From Virginia Woolf's Diaries, September 10, 1918

Thanks, Ela. Paisley Rekdal's 2012 book of poetry Intimate also included photographs. Happy New Yew Year!

Photography-Embedded Fiction & Poetry 2024 from Stephen Downes’ novel Mural Photo-embedded literature—novels and books of poetry which use photographs as an essential element of the “text”—is a core interest of mine and has been somet…

So far, I have found 15 titles of fiction & poetry published in 2024 that use photographs. Some really great examples. Poetry books were half the titles. What did I miss? sebald.wordpress.com/2025/01/13/p...

The 18 notable books I read in 2024, from Asiya Wadud's incandescent poetry which wants to become dance, to Jeremy Eicher's Time's Echo, on music composed to commemorate the Holocaust. Also: @saintsoftness.bsky.social, Yoko Ogawa & Cristina Rivera Garza. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/01/02/n...

David Peace’s 1980: “The vast kingdom of grief” “e cannot write e cannot tell memory and vocabulary not enough here neither dead nor alive before the king of the vast kingdom of grief. . .” As David Peace’s novel 1980 opens, it is early December…

I'm doing a 6-parter on David Peace's Red Riding Quartet, one of the most malevolent places I have experienced in the world of literature. Peace has taken us inside the fat belly of a very uncomfortable whale, a place where there is no exit but death. Part 4 is just up.

I can't imagine an early diagnosis, Joe. My wife's father had dementia, but in his 80s. It was really tough on everyone around, even then. My admiration goes to all caregivers - family and institutional ones alike.

‘Small Things Like These’ Review: The Fears of a Watchful Father Cillian Murphy of “Oppenheimer” fame plays an Irishman interrogating a system of abuse and forced labor, despite everyone’s warnings to look the other way.

After watching the movie version of Claire Keegan's "Small Things Like These," I really need to read the book. Powerful film, great acting, little is said (but much is whispered). Cillian Murphy spends half the film looking deeply inward.