If you're chagrined abt the "enshittification" of everything & believe in a return to first-order principles like paying writers decently, evaluating work independently of the author's platform, & publishing in print, then you might just believe in us too.
bigscorelit.net
V Woolf
Hemingway
Dostoevsky
Beckett
Pynchon
New issue coming soon of @bigscorelit.bsky.social aka the lit mag I edit... Read more abt us at the link
beyondtheframe.substack.com/p/big-score-...
"What they often evinced was better than interest, better even than bibliophilia; it was the rare and precious capacity to be interested in what they didn’t already know interested them. It was a willingness to be changed."
10.02.2026 22:31 — 👍 12 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 0
In @nytopinion.nytimes.com
“‘Wuthering Heights’ is a story in which love is an all-encompassing obsession that destroys anything in its path. It is also a story about how love, sustained through generations, eventually redeems that destruction,” B.D. McClay writes.
With Ron Charles and Becca Rothfeld laid off from WaPo, there are now only 5 full-time book critics working in the United States.
That's down from 7 when this pubbed last year, though you may find my definition of a "full-time book critic" arbitrary.
worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/septemb...
Doesn't feel antiquated to us.
The number of writers on Substack drives home the hunger for reading/writing/community among writers.
We believe in older fashioned network effects. Best way to show support is here, at annual cost of abt a month & a half of Netflix:
bigscorelit.net/subscribe/
beachsloth.substack.com/p/big-score-...
This desire to compensate people for the work they produce feels antiquated, almost like a job, which is a nice way of viewing writers.
Today’s haul from The Strand and @bookculture.com - Primo Levi, Iris Murdoch, Sam Lipsyte, and Yukio Mishima
10.01.2026 21:46 — 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
The Dissection For Renee Nicole Good No scalpel exists sharp enough to cut through all of this: the fat & the gristle of diseased spirit, the tissues upon tissues upon tissues of lies. The corpse of these times laid out on a gleaming slab of fear & violence & hate. No one needs to see inside to know what’s killing us. What killed you. What will keep killing, killing. I’m thinking of you, writing your poem, citizen. I’m thinking, too, of all those who came here to write their own, only to be met with erasure. I hope the light was strong where you wrote it, a witness to the struggle to live in a language not yet poisoned. Oh, take this body away: let it remember dreams of dignity, while we carry your care for others on, out of this morgue, past the cemetery, past those who did at long last die in vain, into a new birth. There’s always new birth, even as the scalpels probe & descend & solve no mysteries. No mystery here. We know. We have always somehow known. I read your poem last night. It was good.
Sent this out via the newsletter earlier and no one really responded to it, so here it is. Someone said writing a poem wasn't an act of resistance, likening it to a fart in the wind; true, but I didn't write this as an act of resistance. I wrote it because I didn't know how else to process it all.
09.01.2026 02:21 — 👍 295 🔁 79 💬 25 📌 3
Today’s purchase at the wonderful @flyleafbooks.bsky.social while here in Chapel Hill, NC - The Mezzanine by @nicholsonbaker.bsky.social (which I’ve read and plan on teaching next semester), and Lost in the City, by Edward P. Jones (which I’ve not yet read and I can’t wait to fix that)…
27.12.2025 21:53 — 👍 7 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0
"Literature is fragile. It serves no obvious purpose. It does not feed us or clothe us or, unless you get very lucky, enrich us. But literature is also as close to immortal as any cultural endeavor of humankind has ever been."
Gerald Howard
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/o...
The Smart Search List of the Day is: Fee-Free Literary Poetry feat. @paranoidxtree.bsky.social @bigscorelit.bsky.social et al. https://duotrope.com...
11.12.2025 13:05 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0Late-breaking update from a litmag now open for submissions (no fee to submit; pays for published work): bsky.app/profile/bigs...
03.12.2025 16:50 — 👍 1 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0
We are currently open for poetry subs for our spring '26 issue & will remain so until Dec. 15th or the moment, nay the very second, we hit 300 subs...
bigscorelit.net/2025/12/03/p...
