@brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Award winning indie publisher | Poetry | Essays | Fiction | Lay out your unrest | Widening access to the arts | Editor: @godzillakent.bsky.social | For reviews: [email protected] | Founded: 2018
Website: brokensleepbooks.com
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialPercival Everett is a distinguished professor of English at USC. His most recent novel, James, won the Pulitzer Prize. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2024.
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialPresiding over the book is the gaze itself, unreliable and indispensable, on which every picture, and every word, depends for its existence.
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialEverett treats each work as a philosophical problem, weighing originality against borrowing & the ritual of making against the finished object, with a logician's wit that drives each argument through riff & refrain until it breaks apart into homophone & pun.
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialAbstraktion und Einfühlung is Percival Everett's collection of seventeen poems on modern art, first published in 2008, moving among the work of Picasso, Manet, Gauguin, and Van Gogh and the museums that house it.
@abrackenbury.bsky.socialReposted by @brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialIt seems oddly fitting to read these 2 fine books from @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social in a dimly lit pub, forgetting a looming appointment... I particularly recommend @jakeareynolds.bsky.social 's dream-like journeys & G B Clarkson's imagined holiday with George Eliot!
@inksweatandtears.co.ukReposted by @brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialDo check out our latest review! @timrelf.bsky.social is 'in Praise of' @andrewmcdonnell.bsky.social's '55 Devotionals (Against Erasure)' @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social, finding a 'vein of joy, gratitude and wonder'.
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialEdited by Abi Weaver with Farah Wardani and Daniele Rugo, it treats motherhood as a political position rather than a background condition, and declines the humanitarian image's request for pity.
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialAround this sits a week-by-week diary of twenty-six rehearsals, critical chapters on maternal authority in displacement, and post-performance interviews with five of the participants.
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialAt its centre is a performance script in fourteen scenes drawn from the women's own testimony, moving between the border crossing, the hostility of the host community, and the ordinary rituals of embroidery, kept objects, and a shared meal.
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialStrangers gathers a three-year collaboration between twelve Syrian mothers and caregivers displaced in Beirut's Shatila camp, the practitioners of Laban Theatre Company, and the project's researchers and filmmaker.
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialBowl of Grapes makes luxury inseparable from cruelty, complicating the abundance of the table. The register moves between the lewd, the frightened, and the tender, and Sanders ends at a threshold, weighing what it would cost to leave the body behind.
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialSanders writes from baths, beds, packing boxes, and other people's houses, tracking desire, medication, sleeplessness, and dreams with a humour that stays dry even at its most exposed.
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialBowl of Grapes by Lenni Sanders is a pamphlet of appetite and its embarrassments, where the body is at once the site of pleasure and a problem to be managed.
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialThe Ballad of Malady Nelson is humorous, weird, mad, unsettling, original and unmissable.
— Astra Papachristodoulou
It’s an unbearable hotspot and linguistic contagion of feeling.
— Tim Etchells
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialAgainst a backdrop of pandemic Britain, economic collapse, and neighbourly ritual, illness becomes both spectacle and domestic labour, and the ballad's mounting refrain starts to sound like an accusation.
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialIts narrator is 39, living with her mother, & speaks in a diction that makes abscesses & discharge sound tender. Arscott and McCauley dress her in racecourse finery, then flatten her into wallpaper before the book opens out onto rooftops and a burning globe.
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialThe Ballad of Malady Nelson is a poetry comic that builds with momentum, each panel swallowing the lines before it until a single sentence has grown into a catalogue of chronic illness, botched surgery, and care that never arrives.
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialWhitehouse finds company among others estranged from language, Zazetsky writing his way back from a head wound and Baudelaire silenced in an asylum, and what accumulates is less lament than an account of language repossessed word by word.
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialAfter a Short Illness is John Whitehouse's meditation on aphasia, written from the aftermath of a stroke that almost severed his speech. The poems work in short, image-dense stanzas that measure the distance between talk and utterance.
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.socialDiscredited Universe Models questioningly sings of the unsettled-between we call life.
— Heidi Williamson
