mark leidner

getting a mfa is like going to the citadel in game of thrones to become a maester

Words have such super meanings

a long-held worldview of mine is getting absolutely bodied by one of today’s current events 😔

after the odyssey, christopher nolan needs to team up with vince gilligan to make a movie about pluribus and memento happening to the same person at the same time

bro last night was like if pluribus happened to gerard butler in greenland 2

bro last night was like if pluribus happened to gollum in middle earth

according to WME, tarantino’s hateful comments did an estimated $70 million worth of damages to paul dano’s reputation, but on gofundme, the paul dano reputational recovery fund is now approaching $110m, exceeding its target of $70m by close to $40m as of dawn this morning

what society really needs

isn’t marty supreme

but a film in the style of marty supreme

set during biblical times

about a brash, young, iconoclastic shepherd

no one really likes

who sacrifices everything—his health, his relationships—

to be present at the nativity

my dentist told me he dreamt tarantino

made a hagiographic prestige documentary

about paul dano as a form of penance

Faculty Hilary Plum's latest novel, "State Champ," out from @bloomsburybooksus.bsky.social, was named in the @parisreview.bsky.social's "Our Favorite Books of 2025" list (selected by @markleidner.bsky.social) 🏆🏃‍♀️🩸

Full list: www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/12...

Our Favorite Books of 2025 by The Paris Review December 12, 2025 – This year, we asked our contributors, our readers, our current and former interns, and other friends of the Review for their favorite books of the past year. Here’s what they said.

@parisreview.bsky.social includes STATE CHAMP in its list of "Our Favorite Books of 2025!" "Hilary Plum's novel has a pulpy, political premise that is complemented by an arresting structure and complex characterization." -- @markleidner.bsky.social www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/12...

dreamt the last level of jedi training was firing up your lightsaber in the shower and having to block every single droplet of water

As long as the grid has a few of these things every so often

It’s fucked up that in the Book of Job, the main character is made to suffer endlessly through no fault of his own, and his name is spelled the same as the thing you have to do for money 2,000 years later.

We need a massive New Deal-esque spending program to redirect all the rivers within the United States to flow along contiguous state borders—so that a map of the United States would look like a jigsaw puzzle of states, with rivers being the seams between the pieces.

(to the tune of eleanor rigby) eleanor rigby

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" should’ve been titled “Thirteen Ways of Being Looked at by a Person When You Are a Blackbird” to center the blackbird’s POV even though the poem is from the POV of people.

Whenever I eat my breakfast, I pretend like there are hidden cameras all around me, and it’s up to me to just act natural and eat because some visionary Hollywood studio executive has greenlit a movie with the craziest pitch of all time: What if some random guy ate his breakfast?

no context drunk on eggnog thought: fjords are the stealth archers of landforms

They’re booming Margaritaville at the Christmas tree farm.

terraformed a local river just in time for thanksgiving. now it runs through my yard, powering a mill wheel connected to a pump to keep my 30ft thanksgiving-themed nintendo and peanuts inflatables fully inflated without having to pay the power company a dime

my agent loves the opening of my post-apocalyptic "potpunk" western, featuring a 3-page description of rugged, sweat-stained cowboys chewing marijuana like tobacco in a dusty saloon, but she remains unconvinced by the main plot, about a marijuana famine where nobody can get high

they should sell capri suns in 20 oz. containers. these little foil pouch thingies don’t have enough in them

simply directing beautiful films in order to curry favor with my cinephile dictator

Benvolio just keeps striving to preserve peace in Verona while also never backing down when prompted to defend Montague honor. Exemplary NPC behavior.

i think they should make the giant halloween yard skeletons taller. i don't think they're tall enough yet. they should make them taller & taller & taller, until they reach the moon & i can climb up on one & get the hell off this accurséd place

about to hurl a stone discus at an invisible “wall” that only I believe is there. shattering reality itself. and proving a realer reality lies beyond this shell of one that we merely need to throw a discus through to see *hurls discus* *it sails through the sky unimpeded*

Yorgos Lanthimos, hit me up. I met a guy on the bus last night with a great idea for a movie. I got his number and am texting him now to see if he remembers telling me about it. We both think you'd be perfect for the material.

Noir novels are usually the best genre fiction to read because the payoff of the story isn’t about who did it as much as it is about the tight construction of story which often rewards attention to detail and is thrilling because you can see the fates of the characters before they do.