Timothy C. Baker

Already feeling emotional about this (and still desperately hoping that Glasgow demand is such that the gig is moved to any venue that's not SWG3), but also excited.

Book cover: Melissa Schuh, Literary Autobiography: Contemporary No Elises and their Self-Representations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

Flyer: Melissa Schuh Literary Autobiography Contemporary Novelists and their Self-Representations -Explores the narrative strategies developed by novelists as they cross generic boundaries of ction and non-fiction -Presents case studies of works by canonical contemporary authors -Develops denitions and concepts to analyse forms of autobiographical writing that flaunt their fictionality Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing Get 20% off with this code: PALAUT

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LIFE WRITING Series Editors: Clare Brant • Max Saunders "Melissa Schuh's Literary Autobiography offers a theoretically elegant and literarily sensitive rethinking of the fraught relationship between the novel and autobiography. Central to the book is the concept of performative contradiction, which Schuh develops as the defining aesthetic strategy of literary autobiography—a strategy that embraces fictionality not to undermine life writing, but to open it toward deeper questions of truth, identity, and narrative ethics. Schuh's analyses of Roth, Coetzee, and Grass persuasively show how these works form an aesthetic lineage that contemporary autofiction continues to draw from. This book will be indispensable for scholars across life writing studies, narratology, and literary ethics." —Stefan Kjerkegaard, Aarhus University, Denmark Why do novelists write about themselves? What modes do novelists use to manipulate representations of their personality? Why is it often late in their career that novelists write about their own lives? This book develops the concept of literary autobiography as a genre responding to a profound uncertainty about the knowability of the self, often negotiated through a particular concern with the writing life. Comprising a particular sub-genre and style of contemporary life writing, the autobiographies examined in this book foreground their formal 'literariness' through the explicit use of fictionality, disrupting established (auto) biographical tropes by employing narrative innovations associated with postmodern fiction and prefigured by modernist experimentation. Taken together, they exemplify an aesthetics of performative contradiction, in which novelistic strategies cast doubt on the veracity of the life represented. Exploring works by canonical and popular novelists - J.M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, Günter Grass, Elena Ferrante, and Karl Ove Knausgard - this book addresses the increasing novelisation of contemporary life w…

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, because my book is out now, fresh off the press!
Happy book birthday to “Literary Autobiography: Contemporary Novelists and their Self-Representations” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) 📕🎉! doi.org/10.1007/978-... @hss.springernature.com

The Bonne Maman advent calendar is truly one of the great joys of winter. (Today, apricot with honey!) It is truly frivolous, but makes getting out of bed so much more appealing.

Greater bravery hath no man than to watch an episode of All Creatures Great and Small and only cry six times.

Fondly remembering 25 years ago, when I went to see The Delgados (with pre-album opener Interpol) in New York and had to my way back to the train station on Thanksgiving morning through the Macy's parade.

YouTube video by Merge Records on YouTube Superchunk - No Hope (Official Audio)

Superchunk's No Hope popped up on my MP3 player just as I set foot on campus this morning, and honestly, it's put me in a very good mood. www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9-C...

The Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945 | Cambridge University Press & Assessment

This is going to be pretty useful for all of you and your students! Available for pre-order now! www.cambridge.org/gb/universit...

"you'll be visited by three spirits"

the three spirits:

Another plug for my BookWeek Scotland event on Friday, talking about Nan Shepherd's Aberdeen contemporaries and pals. (My name is Timothy Baker, not Barker, and it's Lyn, not Lynn, Irvine, but so it goes...) www.scottishbooktrust.com/book-week-sc...

Restoring Order and Control: A statement on the government’s asylum and returns policy

These policies, where they aren't just reiterating ones which already exist in a differently worded form, are just plain idiotic.
They show not only a complete disregard for people's lives, or basic humanity, but also reality. 1/

www.gov.uk/government/p...

I probably won't bother seeing the Fennell Wuthering Heights, when there's a very good Andrea Arnold version right there, but darned if this soundtrack isn't shaping up to my album of 2026.

Today on my run an older couple were calling their dog, whose name seemed to be either ‘Glasgow’ or ‘Costco’, and either way, a choice.

University of Vibes with Institutions of X, Y and Z 🫠

How is the dispute at Dundee University affecting students? Students say they are feeling the effects across studios, classrooms and workshops.

These Dundee students do a great job articulating how university staff cuts impact student experience - every HE Senior Manager should read this. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

It's perhaps a little cliché to read James Baldwin's Another Country at twenty and have it change your life, but I did and it did. And I didn't reread it for ages and now am on my third read in three years, and there's so much troubling and difficult about it but it is just so much the making of me.

TALK: Lifting the Veil on Ann Radcliffe's 'The Mysteries of Udolpho' - Professor Angela Wright We are delighted to welcome Professor Angela Wright for the final event as part of the Fear and Fascination Gothic Exhibition programme. This talk is a collaboration with the Centre for the Novel and ...

I’m excited to return to Aberdeen University, where I studied for my PhD a long time ago. I’ll be discussing Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho before the library’s wonderful exhibition Fear and Fascination closes.
www.abdn.ac.uk/collections/whats-on/22931

I am halfway through Flashlight, and it is excellent; I also very much liked The Land in Winter. Here endeth my thoughts on the Booker.

I agree with the calls not to get complacent, but for the moment, I'm just really happy.

Aberdeen friends! I’m going to be talking about Aberdeen friends (Nan Shepherd and Agnes Mure Mackenzie, mainly) for Bookweek Scotland. Come if you can! aberdeencity.spydus.co.uk/cgi-bin/spyd...

I bought Liadan Ní Chuinn's Every One Still Here knowing nothing about it other than that everyone said it was amazing, and oh gosh, this is amazing.

Yes! I wonder if there is a word in German (or perhaps Welsh) which captures the feeling of watching episodes of Morse in the late afternoon?

If anyone does a full taxonomy of emotions, I’d propose the very specific sadness soothed only by ITV crime dramas for the list. (Just started Unforgotten. It’s fine! Soothing!)

And honestly, I’m kinda loving my ‘seated gigs’ era. Sitting is nice!

It’s a wonder of a novel.

This week I saw Emma Pollock (tiny gig in Aberdeen) and Gillian Welch (big gig in Glasgow), and a) my music taste in my 20s was really excellent and I picked right, but b) it now feels weird to have a night without weeping/reliving the last 30 years at a gig.

Photo of a first edition of The Quarry Wood (in poor shape), showing a young woman in a long grey dress and a jaunty red cap bracing herself against the wind.

I'm not going to buy a first US edition of The Quarry Wood, but I like this cover so much more than any of the paperback reprints.

Barker called me up one night and without preamble said "It's opinions, not onions. Not onions. This is Clive Barker. I've been trying to track down and stop this error in editions for decades. OPINIONS."

Okay, I’ve broken. Closing the flat window, for my toes is froze.

I've no beef with your Pynchons and your Danielewskis, but Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing takes bigger risks than any of that crowd. Every time I read it I find it impossible and new.

😍 Boston, you are beautiful. #NoKings