This excerpt from M John Harrison's The End of Everything hooked me and left me wanting more. The novel is a post apocalyptic tale about a man who makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It has been shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize.

“For years Phillip Tennent lived at the edge of the sea, where artefacts were washed up every day. Scavengers, professional and otherwise, came and went. Turnover was higher than you’d expect given the relaxed lifestyle, the constant good weather, the ease with which some sort of existence could be pursued.

Most of the beachcombers took away the first item they could easily carry and sold it on elsewhere. If you had contacts in the hinterland, there was no doubt about how slickly that could be done. But the hard core like Tennent hung on, out there dawn and dusk, shine or shine, throwing the small ones back, waiting for an item that would give them pause for thought. They were committed. They could be seen from orbit. Their living structures glowed at night a hundred miles up and down the coast. By day you saw that temporary qualities had defined over the decades a permanent aesthetic: bothies and benders made of whitened sticks; mirrors and bits of rag; almost anything the tide left, although to incorporate an artefact would have been considered bad taste as much as bad luck. The beachcombers had their limits. Their superstitions gave the tideline its social structures and distinctive quality on the palate.

Further back from the shore, the hinterland was dark, a little more threatening, with its flattened hashmark of streets and its differing sets of rules. There was a lot of poured cement and half-functioning neon, a lot of territoriality; you had to talk your way through the bars, blockhouses and abandoned car parks to get your item out to market.

Coming up from the intertidal, out of the dusty salt wind with his latest find under one arm, Tennent met a woman on her way down. She looked at the object – which was at that time about the size of a baby, and which he had wrapped in some bleached-out rags – and nodded with a kind of measured approval. They studied the horizon together for a moment, and she asked him what condition the sea was in down there that day.

‘Eventually it’ll turn into speech,’ Tennent said, without knowing why.

They both laughed.

She was carrying a week’s groceries in a bag for life with a broken handle. No one was eating much down there. He thought he’d seen her before, living mostly on her own in a hut a hundred or so metres south of his.

‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘Take anything you want of mine. If you need anything, it’s yours.’

Loose white sand blew into the air and whirled around at the edge of the sea like a fog. They turned to face it with similar body language – expectant, alert, anxiety tempered with what could only be described as longing. For a moment Tennent had a sense that something huge was approaching over the water; something fast, which hadn’t been there – or indeed anywhere – a minute or two before. But it never arrived, and the woman shrugged.

‘You’ll be back,’ she predicted. ‘No, I won’t.’

They laughed again and she walked away towards the tide across the perfect sand, the sound her feet made reminding him suddenly of the sound of feet on snow. She waved without looking back.”

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My Person

This is an excerpt from Canadian writer Téa Mutonji's first novel My Person. Tania and Margot have been friends and roommates for decades. Tania tells Margot this isn’t working for her anymore—they’ve been entangled for too long, she wants to "unknow" her.  I was immediately engaged by this story and look forward to reading more but I admit that, while reading the first paragraphs, I was hoping that there would be a recipe for meatloaf, my favourite food group. 

Margot and I were preparing to host our monthly dinner party when I told her this wasn’t working for me anymore. I had decided to end our friendship earlier that evening while grocery shopping at the Metro in our neighborhood. I’d filled my cart with all the ingredients I would need to make meat loaf, which I made every Sunday when we’d host these parties—our Sunday Loaf parties. It was Margot’s favorite meal, my mother’s recipe, a staple in our home. It was my way of saying: Yes, I want this to end, but look at how much I still care. It took eight minutes to walk through the Metro parking lot and back to the apartment. I wasn’t thinking of anything. Our friendship did not flash before me like some kind of dead-wife montage in a film. I did not experience some kind of come-to-Jesus moment in which the Earth cracked open. There was no sudden realization. It was all just cool.

Outside, it was dark. Women wore workout sets while walking their dogs, goldendoodles in their creamy apricot coats. Really, I wasn’t thinking of anything critically, except dodging dog shit. The air was stiff and shifted my mood; I became melancholic, felt even a little exhilarated with anticipation. We’d been hosting these dinner parties since I moved in, not this past August, but the August the year before. It began with a housewarming. Weeks later, on the first Sunday of the following month, I made the meat loaf again for the exact same group of people, and like that, we’d created a tradition.

Before all this, when I had floated the idea of us living together, our friends expressed concerns about our compatibility. She’s so type A, they said. And you’ve just sold your next book, don’t writers need solitude to write? Still, the Sunday Loaf parties had evolved into a celebration of our love: Margot and I always color-coordinated our dresses—merlot or crimson in the fall, shades of blue in the winter, pastels in the spring. We decorated the apartment according to the season and collaborated on the menu. But the meat loaf remained the centerpiece. We both agreed this was proof that we really were in this for the long run. “This” being our friendship, our community, the fine china we displayed in the wooden cabinet behind the dining table.

I was aiming for a clean separation without any complications. I couldn’t figure out an exact reason for wanting to leave. This was causing me a lot of stress, because Margot was the kind of person who’d need an exact reason. There was a void I couldn’t quite explain and this voice in my head that kept saying: It’s time to go. But I couldn’t say that to Margot because I did not want to be therapized. She’d gently present that I was just “being a poet” then suggest I needed a meaningful vacation, somewhere like Delhi. I’d find myself crazed with a sudden loss of faculties and agree with her, and if I wasn’t careful, I might even end up on a red-eye to a meditation retreat, paid for by Margot. A gift she’d then hold over me for the rest of our lives.

Read more: Literary Hub 

WHISTLER - Ann Patchett

 

Daphne Fuller, a 53 year old teacher, and her husband Jonathan are visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York City when he notices an elderly man following them. Jonathan is not surprised because older men often find Daphne attractive. It turns out that the man is Eddie Triplett who was briefly married to her mother and was a stepfather to Daphne and her sister when they were in elementary school. Something happened back then which led her mother to divorce Eddie and Daphne has not seen him for four decades. Because the two of them had been quite close their reconnection makes both of them very happy and they make arrangements to keep in touch. The book slips back and forth between the present and the incident that changed the direction of their lives. The characters are all ordinary, decent and mostly likeable. I found the adult relationship between Daphne and Eddie intense to the point of being creepy but I needed a palate cleanser after reading Switzy, a novel about assisted suicide, and Whistler filled that need.

Perfect Breakfast

“Perfect Breakfast”  excerpt from “The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest”

By Alejandra Kamiya (trans. Daniel Hahn)

*Sensitive Content Warning*

You won’t wait for the light to slip through the window. You will look at Takashi sleeping beside you. It’s good he’s resting, you’ll think, because he has a long day of work ahead. You’ll get up from the futon without a sound, and walk light-footed across the tatami to the kitchen, and you’ll dress there so as not to tear Hiro and Takashi’s paper sleep.

A perfect breakfast calls for fresh fish and the freshest of all is around the Tsukiji market. It’s mackerel season.

You’ll take the train to Tsukiji for a perfect mackerel.

There, every single one will look lovely to you. That blue reflection, the tiger stripes on black that is wet, always wet, like a recollection that never dries, a memory of the sea.

You will shut your eyes, and choose. You won’t allow yourself to be carried away entirely by what you see.

You’ll travel back home with the perfect mackerel in a bag, hoping for no delays. That would be a loss of freshness. A crack in the smoothness of your plans.

Back home, you will slice the mackerel in half and salt it, so it retains the spirit of the sea. You’ll leave the rice to soak, having washed your hands with that coconut soap Mariko gave you. How lucky you are. How many Japanese women wash their face and hands in the morning with coconut soap?

You will imagine a beach like the ones in travel-agent advertisements and focus your imagination up at the tips of the palm trees: you’ll see the coconuts, the ones they used for making the soap so that your hands could be soft this morning. You will wish that something of this beach and this coconut whiteness might pass into the rice through your hands as you wash it and leave it to rest.

The resting is important. In all things.

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Caro Claire Burke invites you to see NAZA.

Caro Claire Burke, author of bestselling novel “Yesteryear”, is asking all her followers to see a movie. That movie is NAZA, an award-winning documentary that explores Israel’s brutal military tactics in Gaza.

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Switzy Review

“… the day would come and he’d find that the contents of his brain had been excised with an ice cream scoop instead of these dainty little teaspoons, here and there.”

Emma Cline’s novel is about David Hastings, a long divorced, retired American executive who suffers from dementia and has opted to seek assistance in dying at a Swiss clinic before he becomes too impaired to make an informed decision to end his life. On his corporate flight to Zurich, provided by his former boss, he stops in London  to visit his daughter Rebecca, and her young son with whom he has only a distant relationship. They have a cordial visit and he does not disclose his intention to them. He is accompanied by Cody, his assistant/caregiver, who appears to anticipate his every need. It gradually becomes obvious that David has another visit he wants to make before signing off. Tom was David 's former boarding school roommate. They developed an intimate relationship and David was also drawn into Tom’s family circle. We are made privy gradually to an incident that put an end to Tom and David’s friendship and is driving David’s need to make amends. 

Switzy was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026 but was eliminated from the shortlist.

A Poem by Denis Johnson

 Looking Out the Window Poem

By Denis Johnson

The sounds of traffic   

die over the back lawn   

to occur again in the low   

distance.

The voices, risen, of

the neighborhood cannot   

maintain that pitch   

and fail briefly, start   

up again.

Similarly my breathing rises   

and falls while I look out   

the window of apartment   

number three in this slum,   

hoping for rage, or sorrow.

They don’t come to me   

anymore. How can I lament   

anything? It is all

so proper, so much

as it should be, now

the nearing cumulus   

clouds, ominous,   

shift, they are like the

curtains, billowy,   

veering at the apex

of their intrusion on the room.

If I am alive now,   

it is only

to be in all this

making all possible.   

I am glad to be

finally a part

of such machinery. I was   

after all not so fond

of living, and there comes

into me, when I see   

how little I liked

being a man, a great joy.

Look out our astounding

clear windows before evening.   

It is almost as if

the world were blue

with some lubricant,

it shines so.

Copyright Credit: Denis Johnson, “Looking Out the Window Poem” from The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New. 

Via TMN

Gift For Readers

This enamel pin is available at The Reader’s Catalog

Transcription - Kate Atkinson

Transcription is a 1981 British spy novel by Kate Atkinson that tells the story of Juliet Armstrong. It opens in 1981. Eighty year old Juliet has been struck by a car. Grievously injured, she begins reflecting on the complex life she has lived. In 1949, at the age of 18, Juliet was recruited by MI5 to transcribe secret recordings of meetings between British fascist sympathizers and an undercover agent. She is drawn deeper into espionage and is asked to infiltrate another British nazi group. She becomes part of a sting operation that leads to the arrest of its members.

Ten years later in 1950 Juliet has left her work as an agent behind and works as a producer of children’s radio shows at the BBC where she finds herself confronted with figures from her past and realizes that she herself is being spied on by MI5.

There is a zigzagging chronology from 1981 to 1950 to 1940 and back again. There are so many characters who mask who they are and plotlines that veer off in unexpected directions that I had to keep doubling back to keep them all straight.

I was interested in the author’s note at the end where she talks about the source materials from which she drew her inspiration for the novel. I may return to some of the novels I read years ago about the Cambridge spies.

 

wainwrightbookbinding

Charlotte Wainwright’s bookbinding and marbling studio.

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Wash, a very short story by Stuart Dybek

In a slip that is the only thing pink about the day, she strains from the décolletage of a third-story window. Rain beats her with an intensity reserved for glass while she reels in the pulley line hand over hand, a shoulder strap down, a breast nearly slipping free as clothespins drop from between her teeth, just before she disappears into white furls, fighting in the sheets as the L streams by with its cargo of eyes.

All you’ll ever know of her is what you’ve already learned about hanging out wash.

Via Biblioklept

On The Day Dolly Died

Via Duck Soup

The Wisdom Of The Galaxy

A short scifi story by Will McMahon 

*There is a content warning at the top of the page*

When 2008 hit and I got laid off from Circuit City, a friend of mine managed to get me work at the local supermarket deli. It was a shit job, but I was beyond grateful at the time.

Interesting people work at the deli, or at least they did then. Ty was 6’4” and maybe 150lbs, the loud-mouthed stoner to my reserved stoner—that is to say, my best friend and the reason I had a job. Chester was something of a loner, with this long, greasy mullet, but was friendly enough. Tina was a punk rocker just here until her band made it on tour, with bright pink hair and anarchist tattoos. And then there was Roz, a quiet, middle-aged guy with thick glasses and a crew cut, whose nickname was short for Roswell, on account of the fact that he claimed he was being abducted by aliens.

The worst part of the job was the customers, who were entitled beyond belief and hardly seemed to view us as human (the feeling was mutual). Complaining about them was a favored pastime of Tina, Ty, and myself. Chester was more polite, to his credit, and Roz had his head in the stars. He worked Sunday to Thursday, and, every Thursday evening, he’d say goodbye to us in case the aliens decided to take him away for good that weekend, in which case he wouldn’t be able to come into work Sunday because he’d be on a ship hundreds of light-years away, learning the wisdom of the galaxy. We’d wish him bon voyage and see him again Sunday morning.

Our store manager Mike was, generally speaking, an asshole. Already a petty tyrant, the recession really juiced him up. There was a constant line of people in front of his office, begging for jobs; that kind of thing goes to a guy’s head. Ty had slipped me in because Mike somehow thought he was a good worker, but Mike’s asshole nature was well-remarked upon in the deli, and the rituals of light hazing I endured as the new guy usually centered around throwing me into conflict with him. The most frequent of these was stealing lemons from the produce section. Residue would build up in the deli’s ancient cheese slicer, and if you didn’t clean it out it would jam up. The cleaning gel was bright blue and noxious and took fifteen minutes to break down the gunk, and meanwhile the line would back up with customers losing their shit. The bootleg solution, then, was to run a couple lemons through the slicer; the acid cut right through the cheese residue, and we were back online within a minute or two.

Mike hated the lemon trick, claiming it damaged the machine. I don’t know if that was true, but, as far as we were concerned, the sooner that piece of shit broke down for good, the better. In the meantime, the lemons were the only things keeping us sane. Mike was always on the prowl, and he’d make sure to do his rounds coming through produce on the way to the deli, trying to catch us. He used to watch on the security cameras too, but Roz had figured out a way to sabotage the one near the deli and after that no one had been able to fix it. We asked him how he’d done it, and he just gave us this look like we didn’t want to know.

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Quote Of The Day

“Patriotism is proud of a country's virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, "the greatest", but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is.” 

- Sydney J. Harris, American journalist, author, and drama critic best known for his popular daily column, "Strictly Personal," which was syndicated in over 200 newspapers across the United States and Canada.

Garlands

Poet Alastair Reid arranged unusual words into “garlands,” rings that end where they began:

What is a Tingle-Airey?

A tingle-airey is a hand organ, usually played on the street by the turning of a handle, and often decorated with mother-of-pearl or piddock shells.

What are Piddocks?

Piddocks are little mollusks which bore holes in rocks and wood, or in the breastsummers of buildings.

What is a Breastsummer?

A breastsummer is a great beam supporting the weight of a wall, and sometimes of a gazebo above.

What is a Gazebo?

Continue reading: Futility Closet

Savage : The Making of Modern Dogs in British Hong Kong

China Books Review: Savage is a brief history of Hong Kong’s most beloved — or is it reviled? — inhabitants: dogs. Catherine Chan, a historian at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University, examines how dogs shaped work, play and politics from the territory’s colonial period (1842 to 1997) through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Time and Again

A short story by Breece D’J Pancake.

Mr Weeks called me out again tonight, and I look back down the hall of my house. I left the kitchen light burning. This is an empty old house since the old lady died. When Mr Weeks doesn’t call, I write everybody I know about my boy. Some of my letters always come back, and the folks who write back say nobody knows where he got off to. I can’t help but think he might come home at night when I am gone, so I let the kitchen light burn and go on out the door.

The cold air is the same, and the snow pellets my cap, sifts under my collar. I hear my hogs come grunting from their shed, thinking I have come to feed them. I ought to feed them better than that awful slop, but I can’t until I know my boy is safe. I told him not to go and look, that the hogs just squeal because I never kill them. They always squeal when they are happy, but he went and looked. Then he ran off someplace.

I brush the snow from my road plow’s windshield and climb in. The vinyl seats are cold, but I like them. They are smooth and easy cleaned. The lug wrench is where it has always been beside my seat. I heft it, put it back. I start the salt spreader, lower my shear, and head out to clean the mountain road.

The snow piles in a wall against the berm. No cars move. They are stranded at the side, and as I plow past them, a line falls in behind me, but they always drop back. They don’t know how long it takes the salt to work. They are common fools. They rush round in such weather and end up dead. They never sit still and wait for the salt to work.

I think I am getting too old to do this anymore. I wish I could rest and watch my hogs get old and die. When the last one is close to dying, I will feed him his best meal and leave the gate open. But that will most likely not happen, because I know this stretch of Route 60 from Ansted to Gauley, and I do a good job. Mr Weeks always brags on what a good job I do, and when I meet the other truck plowing the uphill side of this road, I will honk. That will be Mr Weeks coming up from Gauley. I think how I never met Mr Weeks in my life but in a snowplow. Sometimes I look out to Sewel Mountain and see snow coming, then I call Mr Weeks. But we are not friends. We don’t come around each other at all. I don’t even know if he’s got family.

I pass the rest stop at Hawks Nest, and a new batch of fools line up behind me, but pretty soon I am alone again. As I plow down the grade toward Chimney Corners, my lights are the only ones on the road, and the snow takes up the yellow spinning of my dome light and the white curves of my headlights. I smile at the pretties they make, but I am tired and wish I was home. I worry about the hogs. I should have given them more slop, but when the first one dies, the others will eat him quick enough.

I make the big turn at Chimney Corners and see a hitchhiker standing there. His front is clean, and he looks half frozen, so I stop to let him in.

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A Field of Finches Without Sight Still Singing

A poem by Grace Cavaliere, former poet laureate of Maryland.

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Do You Remember Library Checkout Cards and Stamps?

 

Only fellow Olds may recognize this epic souvenir I got at the New York Public Library…

[image or embed]

— Aiyana White (@aiyanaewhite.bsky.social) August 11, 2026 at 9:58 PM

TEXAS

 by David Berman

Along the inner stream I found a hive split open.

I was deep in the country, where they said

I would find swollen dogs and trees covered in dust.

I found a house with windows and a door.

Once a man stumbled into the barn with a fresh axe wound.

I let him clean it out with vodka, then he pulled out

a red gun and told me he was gonna put me in the ground.

The sound made a hundred crows rise out of the field.

I remember sleeping by the pond,

waking up to see crumbled bees on the lips of a brown dog

standing over me.

I just lay there

trying to measure the diameter of its eyes.

I used to think I went there for the everchanging scenery,

or for the way the days just pass away.

They had told me Texas sat on the land,

harvests and oil, ten dimes to the dollar,

one star,

but those aren’t the things I saw.

I couldn’t walk an unbroken line there.

The window sill was a frame,

the state was a house,

and the doormat was on fire.

First published in Caliban #8, 1990 

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