Samuel Ashworth

Moe Eckstein, that beautiful degenerate!

#FridayReads My most recently finished read that I've been telling everybody about is The Death and Life of August Sweeney by @samuelashworth.bsky.social. A wonderfully written, constructed, and researched story!

It’s day 2 of #AWP and it’s become clear that the bars of the inner harbor had absolutely no idea what was coming

fake barrelhouse university "MFA degrees" to use as prizes at the Barrelhouse AWP conference booth

At @barrelhouse.bsky.social University we care about education, and that's why we will be conferring these MFA degrees next week to lucky wheel-spinning degree-seeking participants at Booth 1185 at the AWP Bookfair. The children are our future, even the poets.

That might be really helpful - I am getting myself back up Friday. Let’s be in touch tomorrow?

Calling all AWP maximalists! Tomorrow at 10:35 we’re gonna be talking about what to do if your book freaks out the squares.

“Look, beloveds. Across the vast, forbidding sweep of the publishing savannah, there is only one creature who ever works for free: the author.”

And he works for TWO agencies that's how you know he's really good

What’s crazy to me is that this uses the language of publishing, but it has no idea what any of that language means. the LLMs don’t seem to have the first notion of how publishing actually works.

It’s never going to end is it

maybe the reason the boomers got so worked up about millennials eating avocado toast in the 2010s was that avocado toast unambiguously whips ass and they were jealous they didn’t have it growing up

Is anyone driving from Baltimore back to the DC area on Thursday evening, or from DC back to Baltimore on Friday morning? I need a ride and will bring great snacks.

Did you know that if you buy my book on Amazon, Jeff Bezos makes 5 times as much as I do on each copy sold? Sharing some behind-the-scenes book math on why buying directly from presses is best for EVERYONE (except Bezos) in my newsletter today! aubreyhirsch.substack.com/p/book-math

As the laid off Middle East News Editor, I concur. Management eliminated the positions of every single staff correspondent and bureau chief in the Middle East.

Intellectually I can see that it is snowing but morally I deny it

I really feel like this is my fault, I was too vocally nostalgic for the late 90s and didn’t realize that would mean we’d wind up back in 2003

i see we've got the "No it won't" side down

My absolute hands-down slam-dunk favorite Dylan song

a flyer for an AWP panel called "IS MY BOOK TOO MUCH?" to be held thursday March 5 at 10:35am

Fellow sickos of AWP! Thursday morning I will be talking about selling weird books with @poeticmoni.bsky.social, Daria Lavelle, and Catherine Dang. Most of all, rather than talk much about our books, we're gonna talk about *yours.* If you ever worried your book was Too Much, this panel's for you.

You might have the same trouble publishing it as you do with song lyrics, but maybe journal rules are different? Though if I were the editor I would kind of appreciate a photoset but I’m lazy.

Tomorrow at the Writers Center in Bethesda! It’s gonna get real.

i literally finishes rewatching S&A season 1 last night and i might hyperventilate

SCREAMING

I am sure that there is a Good Business Reason for this but I truly, truly, truly do not understand why in this era of frictionless digital payment we cannot pay a buck or two for an article without subscribing in the way you used to be able to pick up a copy of the newspaper for 50 cents.

My main issue with single-author Substacks and the like is that in order to make a subscription feel like a value, the writer, who is charging basically the equivalent of a Harpers subscription, is obligated to put out 2-5 posts a week. And no one, simply no one is that interesting.

a flyer advertising writers' hours at Flor Coffee+Books in georgetown on Mondays 8:30-10:30.

If you're a writer in the DC area and you're looking for a community, free editorial support, and a quiet place to write, Flor Coffee + Books in Georgetown is launching WRITERS HOURS on Monday mornings. I'll be there as author-in-residence doing free 10-15 minute consultations. Come out!

my hot take is folks with real jobs don't belong at the book fair

I don't blame WIRO for this. When I wrote reviews for the WaPo Book World, the editors checked every quotation from the book against the final text to make sure it was accurate. WIRO likely doesn't have the bandwidth to do that. The takeaway here, as usual, is fuck Will Lewis and Matt Murray.

I also did not know Kitty Kelley was still alive and judging from this, she might not be!

Uh WIRO WYD