Lisa Owens

Opinion | To Obey Trump or Not to Obey (Gift Article) The voluntarily surrender of the public’s power is how autocracies are built.

Friends, this piece by M. Gessen is a bracing, sobering read. We need to understand the era we are likely walking into. We have to ask ourselves what will be irrevokably lost. What are we willing to do to stop it?
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/08/o...

referring to all enemies henceforth as 'typos'

typo is a fantastic insult

[Screenshot of text that reads]: You will never have the perfect life, you will never meet the man of your dreams, you will never be able to retry the forks in the road that took you to darker places, but it doesn’t mean the past is 100% unchangeable and the future is 100% out of your control. The two timelines – what was then, and what’s to come – can work together in the smallest of ways to make the now a lot more bearable.

warning: this @theguyliner.bsky.social piece looks like it's going to be a bit of light relief, but in fact it's a stealth treatise on suffering and joy! theguyliner.com/impeccable/b...

Deal report from Publishers Marketplace: Author of NOT WORKING Lisa Owens's NATURAL DISASTER, unfolding across 24 hours, charting one woman's increasingly desperate attempts to spend a last, special day with her children before returning to the 'real world' of her office job, to Liese Mayer at Little, Brown, at auction, by David Forrer at Inkwell Management, on behalf of Jane Finigan at Lutyens & Rubinstein.

really delighted that my second novel, NATURAL DISASTER has found a home in the US with Little, Brown

yes please! And thank you.

and you Emily! 🩷

The Year of the Snake: very inspiring for the worm community

phew, I had thought the question mark key might be broken on yours. Very efficient to ensure all systems in good working order while simultaneously celebrating new C-LB!!!!!!!!!!

I thought it was more powerful without!!!!!!!!!!! How wrong could I be?????????

100% right (sorry to interrupt)

totally agree!

Yes but only came to it quite recently! This paragraph has been v useful to me writing-wise

I love how eminently re-visitable she is (& btw this was the extent of the piece! A short-form tribute to the short-form queen 😀)

Photograph of the hardback of ‘Our Evenings’ by Alan Hollinghurst

Just finished ‘Our Evenings’ by Alan Hollinghurst. A beautiful, elegiac book, so perceptive at times I found it almost painful (but also, because it’s Alan H, very funny and sharp too)

/ bonfire of the decencies

I love that

yes, and she sort of shows her working which feels like an extra gift

Head, Heart, by Lydia Davis Heart weeps. Head tries to help heart. Head tells heart how it is, again: You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday. Heart feels better, then. But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart. Heart is so new to this. I want them back, says heart. Head is all heart has. Help, head. Help heart.

And here is the poem/story/piece referenced, 'Head, Heart'

I’ve admired Lydia Davis’s writing for many years, and keep a copy of her Collected Stories on my desk. She reminds me there are always new ways into things: her unexpected approaches turn the most mundane material into something complex and surprising. For a long time, though, her formal innovations and often dispassionate tone held me at a respectful distance. I considered her more a writer of the head than the heart. Lately, while going through a difficult time, I found myself unable to read novels. Something about their scale or point of view kept emphasising how stuck I was in myself. Condemned instead to scrolling online, I came across Davis’s micro-story, ‘Head, Heart’. The first time I read it years ago, I’d been left a bit cold by its simplicity—it struck me as reductive and naive. But encountering it again from a place of crisis, I saw the story was in fact a tiny, precious gift: it perfectly understood the inevitability and ordinariness of sadness as well as its extraordinary intensity and reach. I immediately returned to her other stories and was astonished to see myself everywhere: in a lost button, the girl who imagines a little man at night, the old woman whose house is falling down around her. It felt like magic that these words—which I’d already read!—were waiting there to come alive for me at just the right moment. One of Davis’s collections is called Varieties of Disturbance and I think this title gestures at what she does best: recognising that peace is a precarious state, but also that we are never truly alone in our disquiet.

I wrote this a couple of years ago for @stingingfly.bsky.social about the great solace I found (and continue to find) in Lydia Davis's work. Re-posting here in case anyone else needs some Lydia in their life.

Screenshot of text: ‘I went home on the Tube wrapped up among the five o’clock crowds in my own sensations, of a new chord that had sounded, and sounded again just as surely each time I found my way back to it. I felt entirely open to it, as a thing in itself, thrilling and unquestionable.’

perfect description of falling in love (from Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst)

It’s practically a neutral!

all the Limes are (all the Limes are down) and the sky is grey

Now that’s a BLURB (Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald which I have finally got around to reading thanks to @jessicastanley.co.uk)

Bernie Sanders meme with text saying: I am once again asking where has the day gone

just treated myself to a glass of the good stuff*

* November-temperature tap water

‘My boyfriend’s Instagram searches tap into my insecurities. I’m scared I’ll never be his type. How do I proceed?’ | Leading questions There is no relationship where neither party ever finds other people attractive, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But it is still legitimate to ask our partners to assuage our fears

‘There is a difference between “I’m frightened” and “this is frightening”. We get into trouble when we confuse the two’ — another great column from Eleanor Gordon-Smith, whose advice always somehow manages to transcend the particularity of the original problem

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Ahh I’m so glad to hear it! The original copy I used to write the intro from is dense with my underlining — so many incredible observations and insights. I’m so happy you love it 🩷

Lisa, thank you SO much for posting about this - I'm half way through FAMILY HAPPINESS and...swoon. I'm officially a fan!

Play the Hidden Books Game from National Book Tokens! Guess all 20 book titles hidden in the picture.

hiddenbooks.nationalbooktokens.com … good luck