Aran Ward Sell

Thank you! The lens of "failure" was handed to me when I was asked to speak at an event on "the aesthetics of failure". Once I lined up Titus Alone behind that lens, all kinds of interesting thoughts surfaced.

Big thanks to @casella.bsky.social @ancillaryreviewofbooks.org for including my "really insightful" (his words!) LARB piece on Mervyn Peake in this roundup.

The "[legal name and address]" one 🤌

Dope.

Don't think I've seen anything unite my timeline so emphatically as this wonderful man reading these venerable words.

Mohamed Elneny - Player profile 25/26

www.transfermarkt.us/mohamed-elne...

Looked for this comment before posting it myself. That word is *very* much taken.

Ok, I'm going to have to write something less sarcastic about this, but this is... not wonderful.

More importantly, in the longer term, this isn't going to help anyone. This is volume over quality, rapid-slop. This is Thorium Toothpaste - let's use this for everything before we understand it.

I once saw Incubus headline a festival and the only words the singer said the whole set were, pointing over the crowd to a food truck, "It says 'giant hot dogs' over there. You guys could go there if you get hungry."

I think what I'm saying is that the singer from Incubus may have written this sign

In this if nothing else, Žižek's true heir.

One perhaps obvious caveat, but one that can get lost amid breathless evocations of particular texts' experimentalism, is that such ‘experimental’ books are not, fundamentally, unbooklike. Indeed, in their deviations in form and comprehensibility, and their consistency with a vaunted modernist tradition, they are fulfilling exactly what one would expect of artefacts bought and sold as ‘experimental literature’. Similarly, it must be borne in mind when thrilling either at the experimentalism of Denton or that of his modernist forebears such as Joyce or Stein, or at the weirdness of celebrated ‘Weird Fiction’ texts such as those of China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer or H. P. Lovecraft, that we may be thrilled as much by these texts” congruence to our expectation that they will disorient us, as by that disorientation itself. Fisher does analyse the “pulp modernist Lovecraft” as a key writer of weirdness, and in doing so quotes extensively both from Lovecraft’s “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” and from China Miéville’s own work on Lovecraft. However, he does so from a position outside, and strangely ignorant towards, the “Weird Fiction” traditions in which both participate. Lovecraft’s essays are often treated as a foundational manifesto for “Weird Fiction” as a subgenre of speculative writing, particularly his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), in which he writes that “The one test of the really weird is simply this – whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers.” This definition, with its emphasis on dread, is not incompatible with Fisher’s emphasis on wrongness, but nor is it identical.

I prodded some of this a *bit* in this piece on Irish environmental fiction (which, handily for this thread, also cites @danhartland.bsky.social ): www.tandfonline.com/eprint/84TGH...

Right! Which does help him skirt certain groupthinks, especially "I write/read in this genre therefore it's politically virtuous" type. I wonder if half the issue is that (your *imminent* book aside), Weird Fic writers have been serving as their own body of criticism.

I think I see the Fisher book *as* a useful supplement -- it's idiosyncratic and entirely ignorant of existing theories (despite invoking Lovecraft and Miéville at length), and doesn't work as a Theory--but it does look at Weirdness from angles that Weird Fiction authors themselves tend not to.

NON-FICTION Quote the ideal reader of the weird has to embrace a kind of wilful suspension of foreknowledge or generic expectation. This affected tabula rasa perspective requires, in turn, a critical approach, a practice of weird reading [1] hyper-attuned to the weird poetics of a piece as it signals its own weirding and becomes weird fiction. end Quote The Brackish Pool: Towards a Critical Practice of Reading Weird Fiction by Zachary Gillan 26 January 2026 Strange Horizons

Welcome to the 2026 Criticism Special Issue!

The Brackish Pool: Towards a Critical Practice of Reading Weird Fiction
by Zachary Gillan @megapolisomancy.bsky.social

Link ⬇️
strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...

but it's cleared up now

I thought you genuinely didn't know but I see I've mist the point.

In Edinburgh, you'd have a reasonable chance of being correct. Depends on the day, mind.

I was support on a Covid-era orientation Zoom for a large first-year Philosophy cohort (probably born ~2003). The lecturer had a slide of Philosophy Movies. The Matrix, et al.: no reaction. But Arrival (2016)? The chat *kicked off* with enthusiasm.

LARB article on Mervyn Peake I have a new article out, my first for the Los Angeles Review of Books. It’s on the author and illustrator Mervyn Peake, one of the most important writers in my world. Peake’s final nov…

New blog post:

(Just reiterating my @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social piece on Peake, but also a text for how these posts display on BlueSky as I plan to post more soon!)
reasonstoremain.co.uk/2026/01/21/l...

Igor

HE IS RISEN

I love Gabriel Jesus so much

DELIGHTED to be making my LARB debut with an in-depth piece about one of the most important writers in my world, Mervyn Peake.

Thank you Adam! That's very kind.

The Kingdom in His Head | Los Angeles Review of Books Aran Ward Sell reconsiders the legacy and complex overlapping ‘failures’ of Mervyn Peake’s final novel, ‘Titus Alone.’

This @aranws.bsky.social article on "Titus Alone" quotes me, so naturally I consider it excellent: lareviewofbooks.org/article/titu...

Can't fault your methodology.

Ballantine Adult Fantasy: Reading “Titus Alone” by Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast 3) The seventh essay in my Ballantine Adult Fantasy reading series, which looks at Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone (1959), the much maligned third and final novel in the Gormenghast series.

Here's my own essay on the topic, if you want more to read on Titus Alone:

I was so excited to commission and edit this piece by @aranws.bsky.social, which challenges the reaction by many critical that Peake's Titus Alone is a "failure." And I 100% agree! Titus Alone is easily as interrsting than the other two books in the series combined!

Enormous thanks to @guynes.bsky.social who shepherded this piece so thoughtfully from submission to publication, and to the rest of the @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social editorial team who polished it along the way!

DELIGHTED to be making my LARB debut with an in-depth piece about one of the most important writers in my world, Mervyn Peake.

...great review @megapolisomancy.bsky.social. 👀 See comment above.