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weāre so lucky that gilgamesh survived and is a banger. can you imagine if we found the oldest written human story ever recorded and it sucked balls.
We only find the bangers! This is a really important thing to remember both when analyzing ancient literature and when comparing your own writing to historical authors.
The less brilliant stories don't survive because people didn't make a million copies of them to pass around. It's pretty much guaranteed that there were a hundred other Gilgamesh stories circulating around the same time that did in fact suck balls, and just as many that were solidly mid, but people didn't write them down as many times (if ever), so fewer (if any) fragments survived.
It's easy to get discouraged thinking that 95% of ancient writers were brilliant compared to maybe 5% of modern writers. But really, it's just that 95% of what survived came from those few truly genius writers. Everybody else was out there telling stories too, and finding audiences who loved them, and producing beautiful art, they just weren't lucky enough or famous enough to get their stories recorded enough times for us to piece them together from whatever fragments survived the intervening centuries.
"The [1728] essay Peri Bathous was a protracted dunk on contemporary poets the author didn't like ... The essay is very incomprehensible to a modern reader because none of the poets getting dunked on are remembered nowadays on account of how they sucked..."
re my "read books that make you feel stupid" post: reading books you don't fully understand is probably the safest way to push yourself outside your comfort zone. you don't have to embarrass yourself in front of anyone. you can do it from your cozy bed. you can easily get help from book clubs or literary analysis online. you can go as slowly as you want. there's literally no risk.
This is just to let everybody know that for Pride Month of 2026, the Ebooks Direct Pride Package has been really ridiculously discounted.
...From the product page:
This package contains all our Middle Kingdoms materialāsome of the first LGBTQ-representing epic fantasy in the 20th-century fantasy field, now continuing into the 21st. It also contains the matter-of-fact exit from the (contextual) closet of two of the best-loved characters in the Young Wizards universeāAdvisory wizards Tom Swale and Carl Romeo, on their first canonically-"out" venture as a couple.
The main part of the collection spans more than forty years, from the publication of Diane Duane's two-time Astounding Award finalist The Door Into Fire, first published in 1979, through its main-sequence sequels (both also Gaylaxic Spectrum Awards Hall of Fame winners) The Door Into Shadow and The Door Into Sunset, to 2018's and 2019's interstitial Tales of the Five novels, The Levin-Gad and The Landlady.
The collection also includes such otherwise hard to find short works as Lior and the Sea and the two current volumes of the "Sirronde's World" group, The Span and Parting Gifts.* And finally, it also includes the Middle Kingdoms noveletteĀ Overdue (Tales of the Middle Kingdoms #2), and the short Young Wizards work Owl Be Home For Christmas.
All that for $19.99? Seriously, I need my head felt! So please go validate my mental state by buying the package.
And happy Pride!
(Meanwhile, the project for the course of the month is to put all the major queer, bi, and/or ace characters in my various series into that shot. Just added: Mevraen, Wyn and Eftgan. Now to get Lissa and Matt and Matt's boyfriend in there...) š
(And the usual sorrowful reminder: With regret, we must remind any UK viewers of this product that, due to Brexit, we can no longer sell ebooks directly into the UK. Our apologies.)Ā
*Before you ask: The Span is "Sirronde's World #1": Parting Gifts is "Sirronde's World #3." Due to timeline continuity and spoiler issues, part 2 has not yet been written. Thanks for your understanding.
need to scratch that itch after finishing Leviticus (2026). these books are queer horror with heavy religious themes!
hallowed be thy name by brooke winters
augustus is heavily abused by his mother through religious means and the devil starts to talk to him in his head. years later, he has to work with another student, Nathaniel, to figure out why his mother disappeared all those years ago.
hell followed with us by andrew joseph white
there's a freaky religious cult in a post apocalypse (that they caused), and they raised Benji with a deadly bioweapon brewing inside of him.
camp damascus by chuck tingle
theres a 100% success rate conversion therapy in the middle of nowhere, and rose is starting to realise that she's missing some chunks of time and there's something drawing her to camp
Please save and share this info where possible. This report has since been removed by Amnesty International due to legal threats of libel from JK Rowling. This information is no longer easily accessible.
Translations: Check out Maplopoās translations of Dazai, Nakajima, Sakaguchi, and Soseki.
Maplopo Magazine: Coming this year! Click the link to reserve your copy!
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Access to their translations free on theirĀ website.
Buy the collectionĀ RetrogressionĀ by Dazai Osamu onĀ Amazon.
Translations Page:Ā where you can find translations of literary works by Dazai Osamu, SatÅ Haruo, and Tokugawa TsunayoshiBiographies Page:Ā where you can find short biographies on a variety of authors related to the translations.
Publications:Ā Want to buy their translations and add them to your library? Check out these publications available for purchase.
Dazaiās School Notebooks: Dazai Osamu attended Hirosaki High School from 1927 until 1930, and many of his school notebooks from this period, complete with the inky doodles of a bored schoolboy, are currently being held in various University and Museum archives.
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List of published translations
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Something I really struggle to get people to understand is that like. Sometimes there was no intentional homoerotic subtext, the author was just extremely misogynistic. Sometimes the author wasn't "secretly shipping" those two men, the author literally just hates women so much that they see them as being literally incapable of relationships with depth. Like this is kind of a big thing with misogyny actually. A lot of extremely misogynistic people truly believe that a man can only have meaningful and complex relationships with other men because they literally just think women are so inferior they only exist to birth children and clean the house. It's like when people say along the lines of "no one worships exclusively men quite like straight men do". It's just that phenomenon actually. That happens to be manifesting in a raging misogynist's writing. Writing a man character who literally only puts effort into his friendships with other men while completely ignoring his literal girlfriend or wife is actually an extremely straight thing to write. And that doesn't mean you can't ship those men or that there are no stories with actual intentional homoerotic subtext. I just think it's important to be able to recognize extreme misogyny in writing and acknowledge it without brushing it off and assuming good intentions when literally all evidence is screaming that this was a misogynistic writing choice and not a representing gay men choice.
I don't know how to articulate this well, but I really fucking hate the way a lot of thin writers write fat characters. Like how men write women "breasting boobily" there is something so dehumanizing about how fat characters are often written. "He waddled", "he lumbered", the writer of the book I'm reading always mentions this characters "fleshy hand" when he does something with his hand. Like, we already know that he's fat. There is no need to describe everything he does as "doing it fatly".
A place for subtext, authors believed to be queer, and classics beloved by the queer community.
Strangers on a Train
Listen on audiobook
Patricia Highsmith
In Patricia Highsmithās debut novel, we encounter Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, passengers on the same train. But while Guy is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno turns out to be a sadistic psychopath who manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy is trapped in Highsmithās perilous worldāwhere, under the right circumstances, anybody is capable of murder.
The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcockās classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith on a prolific career of noir fiction, and proved her mastery of depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life.
Seeing the diminishment and erasure of the legacy of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series occur in my actual lifetime is mind-boggling.
You've got people out here making youtube videos about the legacy of dragons and dragonriding in fantasy fiction without talking about the dragonriding Grand Master of SFF herself Anne McCaffrey.
This isn't some obscure thing where I'm trying to promote someone who is only kind of known because of forgotten representation. Anne McCaffrey was A HOUSEHOLD NAME when I was a kid when it comes to fantasy literature. She's the first woman to win a Hugo and to win a Nebula. In 2002 there was a TV pilot filmed for Dragonriders of Pern.
Eragon, Temeraire, Toothless, and the dragons of Fourth Wing exist because these people grew up on the blueprint set by the Pern novels. Talking about dragons and not mentioning Pern is like talking about Orcs and not mentioning Lord of the Rings.
Y'all need to read your fucking classics before you go talking like an authority on a topic. Jesus Christ.
These are important things I have learned about writing fiction. I know these things, but sometimes I need a reminder. So I am writing them here, both as a reminder for myself, and as a reminder for all those who, like me, sometimes forget.
Characters must make choices.
Characters should often make bad choices before they make good choices.
Character choices should drive the vast majority of the plot. Characters reacting to having random stuff thrown at them is far less interesting than characters reacting to the stuff they've thrown after it's ricocheted around and comes bouncing back toward them.
If a character refuses to make a choice, there better be consequences for that too, and you better have a damn clear way of showing those consequences to the reader and the character.
Nearly every time I'm struggling with writing something, taking a step back and thinking about these 4 things usually helps get me unstuck.
this actually makes more sense to me than like anything else happening in the world currently. like it blows catastrophically to be sure but it checks out
I love it when James Patterson "collaborates" with a celebrity because you can be absolutely certain that, of the two names on the cover, neither actually wrote a single word of the damn thing.
Does no one realize how racist this assumption can be? Most LLMs are trained heavily on Commonwealth and other standardized English corpora, yet now when people from Commonwealth countries naturally write in polished English, others immediately say it āsounds AI-generated.ā
I fear this is the beginning of a really awful trend that will make it even harder for non-white writers to get published.
Got curious, so I went and read it myself. The AI accusation is completely absurd to me. The story is small scale, personal, laden with metaphor, and clearly draws heavily from the writer's cultural history. It's not conventionally told, but the ideas set up in the beginning are woven throughout the narrative nicely - nothing is extraneous, no threads are dropped, and it ends on a thoughtful and somewhat poetic note that explores its core themes. Unless I'm sorely mistaken, this is not kind of writing AI generally produces (at least not without significant human intervention - at which point who cares?)
The idea that it's AI generated because of a couple difficult-to-parse similes (in a piece that employs flowery simile multiple times per paragraph) is so insidious. Oh I'm sorry, this Trinidadian writer's piece exploring the cultural intersections of the Carribean and Indian diasporas on the island wasn't instantly understandable to me, an ignorant anglophone reader - so therefore he must be a fraud? Ridiculous, and in my opinion clearly racist.
first off the bat, "ai detection tools" are certainly worthless vaporware. i am fully agreed on this point. like hagiomoto, i also worry about the weaponization of AI accusations against authors of color, especially ones writing in englishes other than american or british english.
that said, these posts have the absolute wrong end of the stick. first of all, the very first to call this story out were -- understandably, because they were the ones most closely watching the commonwealth prize regional winners -- Black and caribbean writers and poets, like chiemeziem everest udochukwu and previous commonwealth prize winner and fellow trinidadian kevin jared hosain.
secondly, OP (and many, many people in the notes) correctly describes a phenomenon -- the way in which AI writing can resemble styles of writing common in nations that were formerly colonized by the UK -- almost certainly in reference to marcus olang's essay I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me. but this phenomenon has absolutely nothing to do with jamir nazir's piece. the similarities olang' draws between kenyan english and chatgpt are strict structure, the use of specific sayings, and a propensity to use 'wow words' --
The third, and perhaps most important commandment, was that of structure. An essay had to be a perfect edifice. The introduction was the foundation, the body was the walls, and the conclusion was the roof, neatly summarising the moral of the story and, if you were clever, circling back to the introductory proverb to create a satisfying, if predictable, loop. We were taught to build our paragraphs around a strong topic sentence. We were taught the sin of the sentence fragment and the virtue of the compound-complex sentence.
whatever you might think of "the serpent in the grove", i think it is extremely safe to say that this very much does not describe it.
and now i want to get onto the reblog, which really truly bothers me because of the ways it is unintentionally closing ranks around the profoundly racist and imperialist set of pre-approved conceptions of 'postcolonial literature'. because frankly, the serpent in the grove is not thoughtful or complex--it is barely coherent, in very obvious ways. everyone who has written about it has pulled all the same quotes, but here's a few of the nonsense metaphors to illustrate:
A man who had cleared brush like a conscience
Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission
Coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all
She had the kind of walking that made benches become men
(this sort of bluntly failed similie is incredibly characteristic of ai creative writing by the by, far more than any of the elements olang' complains about being accused over, which mostly show up in technical/conversational AI material. @nostalgebraist calls it the "eyeball kick". my favourite exmaple i've seen over the years is āthe moon was truly mother-of-pearl, the white of the sea, rubbed smooth by the groins of drowned brides.ā)
what it is, however, is essentially an intense pastiche of all the frankly racist tropes of "prestige postcolonial literature". i mean, look at what judge sharma taylor said about it:
Jamir Nazirās language is sublimeāprecise yet richly evocativeāconjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy. Through sharp sensory detail, he renders the Grove as a living presence, where labour, landscape, and memory are intimately entwined. Polished and confident, this is a story with a melodic voice that lingers long after the final line. Jamir Nazirās prose pulses with a voice of restraint and quiet authorityāa beautifully told and assured piece of storytelling.
writing from the global periphery, from the caribbean or africa or south east asia or latin america, is always "rich", it is always "sensory," "lush", it is always "about landscape and memory", it is always "melodic." these are exhausted tropes that have been used to describe basically all literature from ex-colonies for the last 50 years, regardless of what they're actually like
latin american writers and critics like sylvia molloy and jorge volpi have talked about the "choke-chain" of 'magical realism', this titanic sweeping label that gets applied to anything coming out of latin america, something that for a long time sreved as a measuring stick to evaluate Real Prestigious Worthwhile Latin American Literature.
there is a commonality there, and that is that literature from The Third World is meant to be about the Land, about the Peoples, about the Personal Struggles, about the Rich Fantastical Vibrant Melody History Memory--this is a mold that has been imposed first by the european and usamerican literary establishments and from there internalized and adopted in literary scenes around the world. volpi criticizes the picture of latin america that the "magical realism" wants to push onto all latin american ltierature as one of "irrationality [...] a lack of reason".
incomprehensibility--the very reaction in the reblog of "oh, i don't understand this, it must be some Cultural Element i'm not understanding" is treated as a de facto mark of authenticity. it's the mass exoticization of this literature, treating it as some endlessly mysterious Other whose incomprehensiblity gives the white literary world a look into the Mysterious Foreign Mind
and it is genuinely really frustrating after years of authors from the global periphery (and in various diaspora, because this type of ritualized Authenticty Signalling is a huge feature of prestige diaspora literature and the subject of the exact same ongoing fierce internal debate, e.g. this piece or this one) trying to escape these stifling tropes, these exotifying expectations, to have a story that--AI or not (and i don't think the 'not' is very likely)--thoughtlessly and mechanistically repeats them, drowning itself in florid incoherence, get this kind of defense from people who earnestly think they are being anti-racist.
i leave off with a couple of good pieces on the story itself and its reception:
Can we say that between the prize and the story and Jamir Nazir, there is something perverse and disrespectful to other writers, because it
The Granta controversy surrounding a Commonwealth Prize-winning story tells us less about AI than about the enduring metropolitan expectatio
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