Matthew Clayfield

Today we launch a new @empirepoduk.bsky.social mini-series to mark the beginning of the Ashes:

A FOREIGN FIELD:
THE HISTORY OF COLONIAL CRICKET

With Tim Wigmore @timwig
Author of Test Cricket: A History
Winner of this year's William Hill Sports Book of the Year
share.google/rukQ1zLzMQT8...

Ernest Hemingway would not have liked you With additional notes on Ken Burns, Modi, Chandigarh, and Mumbai

open.substack.com/pub/matthewc...

To Kheerganga and back A postcard from the Parvati Valley

On my recent trek into the Himalayas. open.substack.com/pub/matthewc...

The worst spokesman for a Ken Burns film is Ken Burns. He's always spoken in platitudes and bromides, but now that he's plugging his Revolution film he's also spouting straight-up nonsense. I just heard him call it the most important event since the birth of Christ. Come on, man.

Here's my angry, hopeful, self-loathing little postcard from last week's Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. open.substack.com/pub/matthewc...

A wild colonial boy Adam Lindsay Gordon in Mount Gambier and Port MacDonnell

I set out to write something short about Adam Lindsay Gordon. Things didn't work out that way. open.substack.com/pub/matthewc...

A wild colonial boy Adam Lindsay Gordon in Mount Gambier and Port MacDonnell

I set out to write something short about Adam Lindsay Gordon. Things didn't work out that way. open.substack.com/pub/matthewc...

"Police focus on ladder placed against the side of the Louvre"

I spend a year plotting a mystery novel and then this happens.

Just went through the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival program and drew up my four-day plan of attack. As always, I’m making an effort to avoid speakers I could see elsewhere and trying to focus on local writers. I’m hoping to walk away having had my horizons expanded a little.

Just went through the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival program and drew up my four-day plan of attack. As always, I’m making an effort to avoid speakers I could see elsewhere and trying to focus on local writers. I’m hoping to walk away having had my horizons expanded a little.

Tim Curry Isn’t Done Yet

This is at once both lovely and rather sad. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/13/b...

Terrific!

Ryan Ruby, Post-American Blues — Sidecar On Thomas Pynchon.

"Usually, the term [post-American] is used to refer to the decline of American influence abroad, but [Pynchon] clearly has something more domestic in mind: a change in the national character resulting from the cancellation of the twentieth century he grew up in..." newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

Close Attention - Dissent Magazine An interview with Frederick Wiseman.

"The best book I ever read about film editing is the correspondence between George Sand and Flaubert. Because when they're writing about writing, I think they're writing about film editing." www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

Thank you!

I'm not sure what is meant by "leaving publishing". As in, no longer working in publishing, no longer trying to get published by mainstream houses, no longer trying to get published at all, no longer writing at all?

Following pieces on M*A*S*H and CHEERS, I'm capping off my unofficial trilogy about classic sitcoms with one on FRASIER.

As an aside, I probably wouldn’t advise watching thirty-three seasons of television in quick succession. It's bad for you.

open.substack.com/pub/matthewc...

"I read long systems novels. I am morally superior to you."

Eternally bitter Murakami fans?

They say literature is dead, but right now I am reading the complaints people have written cause László Krasznahorkai won a nobel and someone else did not.

The Nobel Prize in Literature Is Boring Now László Krasznahorkai, who was awarded the prize on Thursday, is a brilliant novelist and consummate laureate. But has the Swedish Academy lost its sense of fun?

"in the age of ChatGPT, there is almost something heroic about never shutting the fuck up about The Melancholy of Resistance." newrepublic.com/article/2015...

Jens Liljestrand, Nobel watcher, novelist, and longtime friend of this column, had this to say about Krasznahorkai: “Very expected. Very popular name among critics. Also very typical Academy choice: serious, epic, dark-but-humanistic narrator of the apocalyptic European 20th century.” Not only that, but Liljestrand already knows who next year’s winner will be: The new Swedish Academy has reliably rotated between awarding men and women, which means we can get started on next year’s column right now, a piece in celebration of 2026 Nobel Prize–winner Joyce Carol Oates. (The 2026 prize will be specifically awarded for Oates’s tweets about ISIS and dinosaur hunting and “wan little husks,” masterpieces of deadpan humor that were, like all great art, misunderstood upon first appearance. There will be no mention of any of her 157 books—or the fact that she is the greatest boxing writer ever.)

ok I forgive the new republic for not doing their preview as this is very good. JCO is one of the all-time posters and I am only sorry her poison ivy hiking-in-sandals feet tweet wasn't mentioned.) newrepublic.com/article/2015...

"[A]t long last, [men] have their own Nobel Laureate [...] That's right—for the first time in history, a man has won the Nobel Prize. That sound you hear? It's a graduate student sobbing with joy. Big, manly sobs." @alexshephard.bsky.social doing what he does best. newrepublic.com/article/2015...

Yeah, THERE WILL BE BLOOD is his best as far as I'm concerned. I'd like to see PHANTOM THREAD again, too.

Krasznahorkai finally got it. Very pleased.

The comments on the YouTube livestream are, as ever, properly insane.

I know I say it every year, but the best part of the Nobel Prize for Literature really is the confusion and heartbreak of the Murakami fans.

The film? I liked it a lot. Some terrific filmmaking in there, especially in the first half or so. I watched INHERENT VICE for the first time the other day, though, and think that perhaps I prefer that one. At least as far as his Pynchon-related work goes. I'll obviously have to rewatch both.

Sitting in a quiet cinema, waiting for ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER to begin, listening to some dope tell his neighbour about the "trained bear" in THE REVENANT. His neighbour is glad to hear that THE REVENANT is a film. She thought he meant that DiCaprio had been attacked by a bear in real life.