There’s a large group of people blocking the pavement that leads to the bank. I should have settled the bills yesterday, or I should have come after lunch. Today pensioners get paid and they always turn up en masse in the morning, to dodge the midday sun. But even being payday, something doesn’t look right. Yes, it’s mainly old folk here, but there’s something about the way they behave that doesn’t fit with what you’d expect of a bank queue. For example, they aren’t waiting in line, and instead they’re all gathered in an amorphous noisy cluster that seems about to spill over into the road and the front gardens of the neighbouring houses. It looks more like a mob than a queue, an impression intensified by the way they bang pots and pans and set stuff on fire.

I manage just a couple of steps into this frenzied human mass, when I lose my bearings and I stop. Old men, old women, some in tears, all of them furious. I’m about to make sense of their prosthodontic glossolalia when I catch Armilla’s eyes just a couple of metres away — she’s stuck just like me. We exchange tepid smiles and ceremonial nods and start pushing towards one another, attracted like two trains on a collision course, but gently pushing pensioners to the sides as we advance, instead of running them over as a train would.

“Hey!” she says, when we finally meet and exchange kisses that fail to land on our cheeks.

“How are you doing?” I ask.

“I’m doing well, all things considered,” she says. “How are you doing?”

“I’m doing well too,” I say. “What’s going on here?”

“Haven’t you heard?”

“No. I was about to make sense of what they’re saying when I spotted you, and was suddenly overwhelmed by your presence and couldn’t hear anything any more.”

“I hate it when that happens,” she says.

“Does it happen to you too?” I ask.

“No, I mean I hate it when you zone out.”

“I know you do. So, what’s going on?” I insist, avoiding her unsubtle attack.

“The bank’s gone,” she says.

“What?” I ask, feigning surprise out of politeness, as it isn’t the first time this has happened since things started to go downhill a few months ago.

“What you’ve heard! Gone! There’s nothing left… Even the building’s gone,” says Armilla, now pointing with her long right index finger to the place where until yesterday was the bank. I rise on my tiptoes to get a better view. Yes, gone — none of the three storeys are there any more. It’s as if someone had used a massive cake knife to cut the bank out of the block. Or perhaps a cut isn’t the right way to describe what has happened here, because this is no clean incision: there are tiles, the traces of former rooms, pipes, even a poster for a new savings account, still visible on the walls of the neighbouring buildings.

“Oh, this is bad!” I say.

“You can say that again!” says Armilla. “I needed to pay my bills.”

“Same here,” I say. “And they’re due today!”

“I know!” she says.

“Now they’ll cut my supply,” I say.

“And mine! And in this weather!” she offers.

“Yes, that makes it much worse,” I agree. “And not to mention all my savings are gone…” I add, deflated.

“Same here…” she says, deflated too. “I should have stashed my money under the mattress. At least thieves have the decency to leave the building intact most of the time.”

“It sucks to live like this…” I reflect aloud, and we both fall silent.

The silence extends for a ridiculous amount of time. The next thing I know is that we’re alone, standing in the middle of the pavement, next to a pile of burning tyres and two toppled cars, a plume of black smoke climbing up in the air. Everyone’s gone and the sun stings, so we must have been staring at each other in silence for a couple of hours or more. And when I’m able to speak again, I do it saying something I know I’ll regret. “So… do you want to go somewhere with aircon to grab a coffee and catch up?”

“I don’t think we should,” she says, and I sigh with relief. And maybe because I sigh so loudly she adds, “But let’s go anyway. There’s that nice café round here… You know the one where we used to go—”

“Yes, yes, I know which one,” I interrupt. What a cheap shot picking that café, of all the cafés in the world. “Are you sure it’s still there?” I ask.

“Well, when the cafés start going like the banks, then we’ll know we’ve got a very serious problem,” she says. I don’t know what she means, because I’d much rather the café had gone instead of the bank with my money.

“OK, let’s go then,” I surrender.

We walk in silence under the scorching sun. One in two shops looks permanently closed, and the ones that are open are completely void of customers. There are young kids begging from door to door, but no one seems to answer their calls. Opposite the supermarket entrance, a group of police officers stand aimlessly and smoke, covered in sweat, telling each other jokes. We walk past an elderly couple living in a tent; she heats up a rusty kettle on a small fire, while he reads the paper; one of their dogs can’t stop scratching, and the other one licks its balls. We walk past another bank that’s also gone - in its place only angry people and a hole remain. And those tiles, the traces of former rooms, pipes, and posters for new saving accounts, of course. It’s sad to behold, it can’t be anything but sad. But what bothers me the most, much more than all of this banking nonsense, the state of it all, the unemployment, the food raids that can’t be too far away as December gets hotter by the minute, the thousands choosing exile by the day, is that I know very well what will happen now with Armilla. I know we’ll sit at the same table we used to sit at, chat amicably for half an hour, talk about how bad this summer is turning out to be and how horrible things are right now, pretend that we can be friends, and then we’ll bump into a minor disagreement — something truly microscopic — and our conversation will grow more and more tense, until we end up shouting how much we hate one other in front of terrified punters and the café staff. And then I’ll rest my hand on top of hers, say that I’m sorry, that I didn’t want things to end the way they did, that it was all my fault, it’s always my fault. And she’ll say she didn’t want things to end that way either and yes, I’m right, it was my fault, it always is. And we’ll kiss and we’ll go to her place, have great sex in her muggy bedroom, end up covered in sweat and other body fluids, and everything will start again, all the mad fucking will start again, and all the fighting will start again, because I can’t stay quiet under pressure, with the added inconvenience of having no electricity, gas, water, nor savings, because my bank, our bank, is gone. And who knows what will be gone next.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks. “You’re very quiet.”

“I was thinking about those tiles.”

“Which tiles?”

“D’you know when a building is gone and you can still see the old tiles? I mean the toilet or kitchen tiles, on the walls of the buildings that remain around the empty space… Know what I mean? The tiles… The traces of former rooms, the pipes sticking out, all of that… There were some of these tiles on the walls of the buildings that used to surround our bank.”

“And what’s with that?”

“Seeing those leftovers made me very sad,” I explain.

She doesn’t reply at first. Instead she gets her cigarettes out and stops to light one. She offers me her pack and lighter, and I get a cigarette and light up too.

“You say the stupidest things sometimes,” she says. She blows smoke on my face and then keeps walking.

And she’s right, I do say the stupidest things sometimes, I think, as I jog to catch up with her, telling myself that things can always get worse, but hoping that things will be better this time.

This story is from my latest collection, A Foreign Country Is the Past. If you enjoy it, you can pick up the full collection from Bookshop.org.

“Frequent flying leaves its marks on the body and in the mind.”

I write these words after overhearing my row buddy detail his impressive travel itinerary to the air hostess. Over the past few weeks, he’s been in several cities in the USA (he sounds like he’s from that neck of the woods), half of Europe, and is now heading to South America; then he’ll be flying to Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The air hostess observes that he flies more than she and he agrees. He asks if she’s staying in Rio and she says that she is, for two days. He says that maybe she’ll “have time to have a look around”. She says “I’m sick of sightseeing.” He nods in silence, then some more commonplaces. The conversation ends when the seat-belt sign comes on and she leaves. Suddenly we’re crossing the sky at an unreasonable speed.

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I hate minimalism bloggers with a passion. Not necessarily because I’m a fan of clutter, or because I might resent being told to toss my old books in the bin; but because I find the idea of blogging on minimalism contradictory. See, you make a whole identity out of the empty shelves and walls in your house, and yet you fill the world with words... But then, even a broken clock is yada yada yada, and sometimes a bit of simplification does make your life better. I’m thinking specifically about the way I go about putting words on the page; this will be a very practical musing.

I wrote in detail about the software I use more than three years ago. In a nutshell: I use iA Writer for short projects and Scrivener for anything long.1 Or rather, I used, since lately I’ve been doing things differently. What follows isn’t an assessment of the pros and cons of either of these tools, but what I have found works better for me. But before I get properly started, and at the risk of repeating myself, let me make something absolutely clear: if you have something interesting to say you’ll find a way to say it; you’ll write it using pen and paper, an old typewriter, or the public library PC. Conversely, if you have a wind tunnel between the ears no gadget will help you.2 I can’t help with that either.

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The other night I dreamed that influencers worldwide were being rounded up and sent to re-education camps.

It was one of those vivid dreams that feel like a film; or rather, in this case, a series of realistic newsreels. Across the world, influencers were being caught whilst producing their exasperating cunting content in the streets; they were cuffed and dragged shrieking cowardly into unmarked white vans in front of the TV cameras, their ring lights, tripods, and half-drunk flat whites left behind in the rush to deliver them to justice. These events repeated all over the world, with folk of all ages and from all demographics being arrested in a similar fashion, famous landmarks drifting in the background. I don’t know who was behind this operation, if it was a long-overdue international sting like when they go after nonces — this isn’t a question I asked myself at the time. On the other hand, at one point I did find myself wondering why they weren’t shot instead of re-educated. Then the thought crossed my dreaming mind, “Wait a minute… What if I’m an influencer too?” And that’s when I woke up covered in sweat. It took me the best part of three hours to fall asleep again.

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“Influencer” isn’t a label I’d identify with. When I set out to write, when I post — for example — a little essay about something I’m reading and that I liked or hated a lot, I’m not trying to force your hand at all; if anything, I’m only using you as an excuse to talk about myself, as one (a writer) does. I’m not very active on social media and I don’t have a huge following that nods along with my words, as if I were a cult leader. I don’t do selfies or pictures of my breakfast or cats, not any more. I don’t do paid promotions or plug anything, not even my own books, much to my publishers’ dismay. But then, how many times in my life have I actually influenced someone? There must be more than I’d like to admit. For example, I once persuaded a friend to read The Rings of Saturn, by W. G. Sebald. Another time I told a colleague who was travelling to Rosario to avoid using his mobile phone in public in certain areas of the city. Not too long ago I got a gym buddy to cut down carbs in order to lose weight. I have recommended so many things in my life: pens, brands of yerba maté, films, pubs, types of flip flops, the proper way to fold a fitted sheet, and on at least two occasions the optimal route from Dalston to King’s Cross. None of these acts of influencing felt that consequential at the time, but looking back at them, and taken all together, they paint an unflattering picture of someone who has spent years interfering with people’s lives.

Since waking up from that dream slash nightmare, I've been trying to be more mindful. If someone asks whether a certain book is worth bothering with, I just shrug. If they ask where to eat in Central London I say that I haven’t been downtown in years, that they’ll be better off checking Time Out. When a student asked earlier this week whether the language in one of his essays was correct, I said that I had no idea, that improving his writing wasn’t my job, even though I get paid precisely to do this. I have avoided any takes on the new Chris Nolan film, just as I’ve refused to name my favourite translation of The Odyssey, and believe me, I have one. I haven’t said much about the Soccer [sic] World Cup either, even if Argentina made it to the final and played beautifully and to much acclaim. I no longer disclose where I get my hair cut (now I cut it myself, at home, and I have nothing else to add to this). I stopped expressing preferences regarding types of beer (I quit drinking a while back and I have no further comments about this life choice either). All of this silence feels selfish and dishonest, but no more selfish and dishonest than pretending that my opinions deserve an audience.

For my own peace of mind, let me make something extremely clear: you shouldn’t see me as a role model of any kind; nothing I’ve ever written or will write should be taken as advice; if I’m influencing you in any way, no matter how small, you need to rethink your life and figure out how to be less stupid. I might sound harsh, but this is a message full of love: be less stupid, let no one influence you.

And if you happen to read and enjoy this newsletter, I’d appreciate if you kept it to yourself. There’s no need to share my posts, tell your friends about what I say here, or even recommend my books. Word of mouth is precisely how these things get out of hand. Then, the next thing you know, there’s a white van parked outside your place and you’re being asked questions no decent person should ever have to answer.

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• This week I’m reading Martín Rejtman’s latest book, Cuarto sucio, ubicación peligrosa (Dirty Room, Dangerous Location), a very humorous travelogue; hopefully someone will translate it into English soon.

• My soundtrack this week is Shadow Farming, a beautiful album by the unclassifiable Deux Filles.

• I’ve also become certain that black biros are better than refillable fountain pens when it comes to writing fiction, and that Lidl breadsticks are better than the Co-Op ones.

“El perseguidor” is a short story by Julio Cortázar that follows the misadventures of one Johnny Carter, a jazz saxophonist. Carter — based on Charlie Parker1 — is addicted to alcohol and weed; he’s also tormented by the nature of time and reality. He tries to resolve his existential conundrum through music. He fails

I often cringe when reading it. Not because I might not like it — I actually love it, as I do most of JC’s work2 — but because it’s one of the most naïve representations of substance abuse ever written. I think Julio was a bit of a mummy’s boy when it came to some things; it’d take him at least ten or fifteen more years — and falling in love with the much cooler Carol Dunlop — to write about this topic with some flair. But I digress; the reason I bring up “El perseguidor” is because it’s one of the best examples of writing music I can think of.

First, let me get out of the way what I think is the worst possible way to write music: telling the reader what music sounds like. How lazy is that? And what’s the actual point of it? You might as well send them to listen to the actual music and dodge the work. The second worst way to write about music is quoting lyrics. Yes, inter-textuality and inter-poetics are great, but I can’t tell you what a pain in the arse it is to clear the rights for song lyrics; it’s a shame, but give up on that idea and thank me later (your future editors should thank me too). The third worst way to write music is dropping song or album titles, or the names of artists, which is exactly what Cortázar does in Rayuela (Hopscotch),3 and one of the reasons I avoid re-reading it. This is little more than performing cultural capital, and it does little for the work itself.4 Don’t do any of the above; instead, to write music properly, let the music possess your prose. This is how “El perseguidor” works. Critics have long noted that this story is deeply influenced by bebop.5 What interests me here isn’t this general claim, but how this happens at the level of individual sentences.

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As part of this year’s Reading Clinic theme on violence, we’ll be discussing two remarkable short stories by two writers separated by language, geography, and almost a century: “Bajo el agua negra” (“Under the Black Water”),1 by Mariana Enríquez, and “藥” (“Medicine”), by Lu Xun.2

Emerging from radically different cultural contexts, both stories examine societies that have normalised violence. In one, medicine fails to heal; in the other, water itself has become poisonous.

Mariana Enríquez (b. 1973) is an Argentine short-story writer and journalist. Her fiction combines elements of horror, the gothic and the supernatural. She is one of the leading figures of the recent Latin American resurgence of literary horror.

Lu Xun (also Hsun; 1881-1936) is often regarded as the father of modern Chinese literature. His writing uses satire as a means of exposing superstition, social stagnation, and the moral failures of late imperial Chinese society.

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In my life I have suffered from two literary curses: not being able to finish my manuscripts, and not being able not to finish them. Both stink in their own peculiar way, though the latter stinks more.

If I sound dramatic, I apologise; drama wasn’t my intention. But let me make my claim less abstract, tell you what I have in mind. You see, I’ve been working on this manuscript since 2010; not all the time, but on and off since then, sometimes quite intensively. At times I hated it; but more often than not I had the comforting feeling that I could get somewhere. Right now, in late July 2026, it is ninety percent cooked; just some more chopping to do, maybe some light rewriting here and there, and it’ll be done — sixteen years of work will soon come to an end. I should be happy that I kept plodding along all this time, but I’m not. I’ve completed enough manuscripts and published enough books to know that now is when the problems begin.

What problems? Well, several.

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I haven’t had many dealings with Roberto Bolaño in my life. By this I mean that I’ve read some of his work, but that I can’t call myself a Bolaño specialist, or anything remotely close. I know Nocturno de Chile (2000) quite well — it is one of my favourite Latin American novellas; I remember enjoying Los detectives salvajes (1998), even though I should re-read it, as I was too young and foolish when I tackled that beast; and I read several of his short stories over the years, without much discipline or method. Beyond the page, I once posted a link to his short story writing tips on Twitter, earning the ire of a terminally online Irish writer, who manifested no small amount of shock that a guy who died in 2003 didn’t include women among his favourite authors; later I received praise from an Anglophone translator for not including him in a list of my ten favourite Latin American short stories — I never knew what to make of this, or why it felt patronising.

That was the extent of my Bolañoing until this week, when I picked up his Llamadas telefónicas (1997), a collection of fourteen short stories. This is the first time I’ve read his short fiction sequentially and in the way it was originally published. One thing became apparent to me rather quickly: these are stories about stories. They also feel closer to the oral origins of storytelling than to a demonstration of writerly craft.

In his 1936 essay “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov,”1 Walter Benjamin distinguishes storytelling from the mere transmission of information. For him, stories are carriers of experience rather than facts; he also argues that they are passed from mouth to mouth. When reading Llamadas telefónicas, I was struck by how often Bolaño's writing unfolds in precisely this way. Most of the pieces in this collection arrive delayed, often mediated by a character who experienced the story directly, who then tells it to the narrator, who then delivers it to us.

Take, for example, the opening lines of these stories (the italics are mine):

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I read Thomas Browne’s Urne-Burial at least once a year.

I must have read it twenty times already, and I’m convinced that everyone’s life would be greatly improved by adopting this same ritual. Beyond its literary merits — which are many — this is a book that puts things in perspective. By this I mean that Urne-Burial is an excellent reminder that we are all going to die, and that we will be forgotten. Most literature is a futile attempt to cancel death; Urne-Burial, on the other hand, is one of those rare texts that embrace finitude with open arms.

Browne begins his necro-journey with the discovery of some Roman burial urns in Norfolk, in the 1650s. But the urns are only a pretext, and he doesn’t stay in antiquarian mode for too long, quickly turning his writing into a meditation on life and death, oblivion, memory, and the futility of posthumous ambition. Browne writes about how the dead survive only in partial and often misleading traces; it is ironic that he himself misinterprets the dead — what he thought were Roman urns would later be identified as Anglo-Saxon in origin. This inaccuracy doesn’t have a negative impact on the book; if anything, it sharpens Browne’s point: remains are just fragments with which the living attempt to reconstruct the world, perhaps with a life-affirming intention.

Maybe I’m doing a Browne here, and totally misreading his book, just like he misread the urns. Maybe he did want it to be an archaeologically sound treatise and just made a basic interpretative mistake, one of those that deem any subsequent argument irrelevant.1 In my defence, I think it’s up to readers to read books whichever way they see fit. This is the way I choose to read Urne-Burial.

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As a writer, I tend to spend a lot of time concerned with small things: whether my work is being read or not has an effect on my mood, much as I’d rather it didn’t; I might spend days going over a couple of sentences, with the sense of urgency of a scientist looking for the cure for a terminal disease; then there’s all the imaginary people who live in my head, who often distract me from family life, or steal time I could dedicate to my friends; then there’s the frustration of trying to make this newsletter work, at least well enough to make it economically justifiable; and so on. None of this matters at all. In the big scheme of things, all of this is just noise. It’s good to have a reminder of that — a book that grounds me. When I start to attribute too much importance to any literary bullshit, I grab my copy of Browne’s short book and read some pages at random. All writing, all words, everything will be forgotten. This isn’t a reason to stop writing or doing things. This is about reframing how we go about life.

Yesterday I was walking in my neck of the woods in London when I ended up in Abney Park, the local cemetery. It’ll never cease to amaze me how many burial grounds in this country also moonlight as parks. I tend to disdain Protestantism, blame it for many of the cultural maladies in this place,2 but I appreciate the practical mindset that made these kinds of green spaces possible. Cemeteries in my hopelessly Catholic homeland, Argentina, are sad and inaccessible affairs; and if not inaccessible, at least they are undesirable as a strolling destination.

During my walk, I once again bumped into a familiar tombstone: Eric D. Walrond’s. If you’ve never heard of him, Walrond was an Afro-Caribbean3 short-story writer who’s perhaps better known for his brief involvement in the Harlem Renaissance. He came to London in the 1960s, after living in Wiltshire, in the west of England, having moved there from NYC in the 1930s. He spent some time in mental institutions in the 1950s, and died of a heart attack, destitute and in relative obscurity, in 1966. I don’t know how he ended up buried in Abney Park. But I know that a tombstone was erected as late as 2008, sculpted by a voluntary member of Abney Park’s carvers group. The only book he published in his lifetime is Tropic Death (1928), a collection of ten short stories that he wrote for assorted magazines and periodicals. It’s a great book — do check it out, especially if you are into writers like Sam Selvon, George Lamming, or Jamaica Kincaid.

And that’s it for today. I wanted to write about Urne-Burial, and I ended up writing about Walrond and his tombstone. On second thought, this doesn’t feel like a digression at all. Browne digs out his urns and tries to make a world out of them; I stumbled upon a half-forgotten writer and I’m doing much the same. We all gather what pieces we can and make something out of them; sometimes we keep oblivion at bay a bit longer.

In the end, of course, we fail. But life is lived in the trying.

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I often think about reaching the end of what I can say as a writer. Sometimes this thought comes with a sense of dread; other times with anticipated relief. Dread, because silence often reminds me of death. Relief, since running out of things to write about would free up a great deal of time for other pursuits.

This thought revisited me earlier today, as I wondered what I was going to publish here this week — nothing I could think of seemed interesting enough. Then I realised that there’ll be only a handful of people reading this, that I’m very likely the only one who’s aware that I keep a weekly publication schedule (therefore that no one but me would notice if I derailed), that I’m doing this mainly because I feel like doing it, that you are just a handy excuse to keep me writing within some constraints, and without my practice succumbing to the chaos of some scattered notes here and there (more on this below). And here the writerly blockade was lifted, and suddenly I was churning out this thing you are reading now. I say “this thing”, because I don’t yet know what it is, just like I still don’t know what it is about. I guess we’ll figure out all of this together.

Writing I am, yes, and this leads me to an interesting question: What drives a person to the page? Or rather, why do some people feel the need to write, even when no one is reading? Right here, in this specific sentence, I don’t have a good answer to offer. But I do know that some people feel this compulsion to write, that when the hours of the day drag on and they haven’t been able to sit down to doodle some words for some minutes, they begin to feel an urge to explode. For some writing is a physiological necessity, something that should be treated with the regularity one dedicates to other physiological needs. I include myself in this group.

A while back, my friend Peter Agland classed me as a “graphomaniac”. If it isn’t clear enough, that would be someone who is obsessed with writing. I had never thought about that label before his expert assessment. Now I think that this is a suitable description of who I am. Also, I believe I have found what this thing is about: it’s about graphomania. Graphomania and graphomaniacs. Like yours truly, as we have already established, and like one Gustav Reinfeld.

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Gustav Reinfeld (18?–1951) was an Austrian critic, now remembered mainly for the literary columns he published in the Neue Freie Presse, between 1911 and 1914. His public oeuvre might be modest, but his personal archive, preserved in the manuscripts collection of the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, is monumental: 13,645 notebooks, 78,293 loose folios now bound in 395 tomes, and an uncatalogued box containing around 8,000 fragments on improvised surfaces — calling cards, restaurant menus, matchbox covers, theatre programmes, betting slips, Metro tickets, parking fines, etc — simply labelled Flüchtige Schriften.1 Reinfeld maintained that every sentence carries within itself the duty to write a new sentence explaining it; for this reason, much of the texts in the Reinfeld archive consist of glosses upon glosses, corrections upon corrections, prefaces to prefaces, and lists.2

In his memoirs, French-Uruguayan poet Jules Supervielle mentions almost in passing an anecdote that he supposedly heard from Reinfeld’s widow, Klara M. Reinfeld (geb. Kohler, 1882–1967). She told him that the only time she ever saw her husband distressed was during a train journey from Vienna to Trieste. Having filled all the notebooks he had taken with him on the trip, he began jotting manically on the margins of the railway timetable. Once there was no more space here either, he proceeded to write on the carriage walls until he was stopped by the train guards, with whom he got involved in a heated argument. He was arrested upon arrival in Trieste and he narrowly avoided a trial for criminal damage after explaining to the magistrates that the walls of the carriage had become part of his manuscript the moment he started writing on them, and therefore his own property; criminal damage, he went on, can only be committed against the property of others. The case was dismissed not so much on the merits of Reinfeld’s arguments, but because the carriage was due to be repainted the following week.

Reinfeld’s account of this incident extends to more than six hundred pages, most of them dealing not with the arrest itself but with addenda, clarifications, and rewritings of his statement to the magistrates, followed by clarifications to the addenda, amendments to the clarifications, rewritings of the amendments, and so on. How not to love Gustav Reinfeld, the patron saint of compulsive writers.

But there is one small problem with Reinfeld: I made him up. Somewhere at the beginning of the fourth paragraph I realised that I needed a graphomaniac for this thing, and before I had thought to look for one (for there are many of us out there), he began filling notebooks in Vienna. The irony of inventing him in a text that opens with the fear (or hope) of running out of things to write about isn’t lost on me.

If it has escaped you, I’m certain Reinfeld has devoted at least eight notebooks to this matter.

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It’s hot, isn’t it?

It’ll be 34°C in London later and that’s all we are allowed to talk about. “It’s hot, isn’t it? Or, yes, very hot; but it’ll be hotter later!” And so on. By lunchtime I’d grown tired of all the small chat, and started to think about writing heat. How can a writer communicate this most sensuous of sensations on the page? I mean, we can always just say “it was hot that day,” but that would be incredibly dull, wouldn’t it? Perhaps, this is one of those rare occasions when “show, don’t tell” actually makes sense.

Heat is at the core of my latest collection, A Foreign Country is the Past.1 I wrote this book while feeling very homesick. Ironically, one of the strongest memories I had about my hometown Rosario (and Argentina in general) was the unpleasant, murderous heat of the summer months — I set out to capture this as accurately as possible. While writing these stories I found myself returning repeatedly to Juan José Saer's Nadie nada nunca (1980), in my opinion one of the best novels ever written about heat.2 This book made me realise that the best writing on heat approaches it at an angle.

Let me give you some examples from Saer, first, and then some of my own, where I dealt with heat in similar ways.

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Last summer we met in July to analyse some of the best stories by Jorge Luis Borges. This year we’ll read and discuss a series of seven lectures, titled Siete noches.1

Originally pirated as recordings, Borges later claimed them as his own and reworked them into this collection. The lectures take subjects such as The Divine Comedy, The Thousand and One Nights, nightmares, the gift of blindness, Buddhism, poetry, and the Kabbalah as points of departure for imaginative reflections on literature, memory, and language.

About the author: Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was an Argentine writer, poet, critic, and librarian. He remains one of the most important literary figures of 20th-century literature, and is known for his use of paradox, infinity, mirrors, labyrinths, and imagined books.

About the convenor (AKA yours truly): Fernando Sdrigotti (Rosario, Argentina, 1977) is the author of Jolts, Shitstorm, We Are But Nothing, and A Foreign Country is the Past, among other works. He teaches Spanish, and Latin American literature and cinema at Birkbeck, University of London.

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Bet you won't read this, distracted as you are with the Soccer [sic] World Cup.

Then why even bother writing for you? As always, the answer is “just in case”.1 Personally, I’m sitting this tournament out. I wish I could claim a moral high ground, as I’ve seen some literary peers do on social media, declaring that I find the combination of FIFA corruption and American visa-powered reaction too much to bear. But what about Italy 1934, Argentina 1978, Russia 2018, Qatar 2022? What makes this one worse than any of those? In all sincerity, the main reason I won’t bother to watch the so-called beautiful game this summer is hydration breaks. This was the nail that broke the camel's back, the final straw in the glass, the last drop in the coffin, for me. What’s next? Kid Rock during the half-time break? Shooting ranges instead of penalty shootouts? I can deal with Americans being American about American things, but I can’t stomach the Americanisation of this very non-American sport.2

So instead of watching hydration breaks, I spend my evenings reading Moby-Dick, which is a very American book, in its excessiveness, expansiveness, and megalomania.3 It’s taking me forever to get through it, but then this isn’t the kind of text you can consume in two bites, like your average stadium hotdog. No: this is a tome that demands close attention and patience. Eventually, I’ll get to the end, maybe before the Soccer World Cup deportations begin. And I don't lose hope that the infamous obese beast will turn up too — four hundred pages in and there’s still no trace of him. I mean the homonymous whale in my book, not the orange president. Why should I care about that weird guy? I live across the pond, and we have problems of our own here, even if some of these have been borrowed from the Land of the Free Refills.

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Because this island where potatoes grow aplenty is on fire. Not like Bruce Springsteen — born in the USA — in his famous song. I mean on fire like properly on fire. You might have seen it in the news: riots in Belfast last week, migrant houses being set alight; riots in other parts of the country the week before. Something has shifted, something has taken a dark turn. You see, unlike their continental counterparts, British racists used to pretend they weren’t really racist, that their concerns were legitimate and about things like illegal uncontrolled immigration, or culture, and some cultures being more resistant to integration than others, or religion, or some religions being suitable for crusades and others for living alongside, and so on. These were the lies that made life convivial over here — our peaceful coexistence depended on this very British form of (self-)deception. But now they don’t hide their ideas any more. Now it is about race, and they say it openly, and very loudly. I’m yet to decide whether this is good or bad. In the long run, it might force many useful idiots with minority backgrounds to rethink their collusion with the zombies — because there is no telling when the zombies will turn against you, no safety in complicity. In the short run, there’s no solace to be obtained from the honesty of racists.

The place is on fire and water cannons are unlikely to put the fire out. But tonight I’ll carry on reading Melville anyway. A couple more chapters on the classification of whales, maybe some ropes, knots, harpoons, whale oil, and what have you. I’ll do my best to ignore the Soccer World Cup and its hydration breaks. And all the rest. But outside, someone will inevitably scream. Not because civilisation has finally collapsed, or because the zombies are coming to kick our door down, not yet at least. But because England is playing tonight, and England will have scored, or conceded, or whatever.

After all, evasion is merely another form of participation, and the world has a habit of leaking through closed windows.4

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A recurrent thought after reading a novel: “This would be better if it were shorter”. Of course, I’m biased, since as a writer I prefer short stories to novels. And beyond the personal, there are cultural reasons for my distaste for doorstoppers, as contemporary Latin American literature — which I tend to read the most — frequently errs on the side of the lower page count.

This might sound like an apologia for brevity, which would be on brand for me, but my point here is another: Do writers think about length as they think about other elements of their craft? My totally unsubstantiated, albeit unflinching, belief is that most don't, and instead just do what they are expected to do. I know I’ve been guilty of involuntary page thriftiness when writing in Spanish and word count inflation when writing in English. Since that’s the language I’m using for this piece, let me give you an example from my Anglophone misadventures: the manuscript of what later became Shitstorm, and what I learned after cutting it to a quarter of its length.

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I bet you’ve never heard of J. M. O’Neill.

Don’t worry, most haven’t heard a word about the Limerick man. To be fair, I don’t even remember how I got to him in the first place. It might have been through my friend and de facto adviser on all things Irish, Kevin Mullen; it might have been through one of my students. Somehow, a couple of years ago, I ended up buying a copy of O’Neill’s second novel — Duffy is Dead — from an online seller. It quickly became one of my favourite books.

The novel is set largely in the Dalston area of Hackney, the borough of London where I’ve lived most of my adult life. It follows the misadventures of an Irish publican named Calnan, as he strives to organise a sendoff for a deceased regular — a fellow countryman called Duffy, as you probably guessed. This endearing if bleak comedy is for many critics one of the most vivid accounts of the Irish experience in late 1970s and early 1980s London, for good reasons: heavy drinking, discrimination and police harassment, loneliness and camaraderie, grift and graft, unexpected solidarity — in under two hundred pages the book packs it all. If you can get your hands on a copy, don’t let it pass.

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J. M. O’Neill was 65 in 1987, when he published Duffy is Dead;1 his debut — the now equally obscure Open Cut — had been published a year before. Two other works followed in short succession, Canon Bang Bang (1989) and Commissar Connell (1992).2 In Bennett & Company: A Novel of Limerick in 1928, was published after a break, in 1998; a posthumous novel, Rellighan: Undertaker, came out the same year he died, 1999. I’ve always rated O’Neill’s dilatoriness. I can’t help feeling that too many writers rush to publish these days; I certainly did. It’s good to have some things to write about before you get started; I certainly didn’t.

What was O’Neill doing until he started churning out books? This obituary makes for an interesting read:

J. M. O'NEILL'S career as a playwright and novelist came comparatively late in a busy working life first as a bank employee, taking him from Ireland to England, then to Nigeria and Ghana, and finally as a publican in Islington, as the landlord of the Duke of Wellington, Balls Pond Road.3

It was at the Duke of Wellington, at the Sugawn, the pioneering pub theatre he started in 1967, that we saw the production of his first play, God is Dead on Balls Pond Road…

O’Neill was at the Duke of Wellington in the late 1970s when the large brewers were demanding their tenants committed themselves to expensive leases, which he refused to sign as being totally unreasonable. In 1980 he was finally forced to leave the pub and, becoming homeless, was housed by the council in Hornsey. He returned to Ireland in 1990.

A second, more extensive obituary published by The Guardian gives some more insight into the kind of chap O’Neill was, including the details that he played football in Ulster under a fake name, and worked in the London construction industry. A busy and colourful life, I guess; what terminally online folk now call “a portfolio career”. But besides what’s available in these write-ups, much of it repeated in later pieces here and there, and a short but beautiful documentary film by Paul Duane,4 there’s little information about O’Neill. Not even a Wikipedia page for him. This is a lacuna that makes me feel a lot better about my own digital irrelevance.

But do we need to know more about him to appreciate his work? I don’t think so. After all, good writing speaks for itself.

This Sunday I had a strange encounter with Mr O’Neill.

It happened in Stoke Newington, not terribly far from his pub, the Duke of Wellington. I was after a copy of Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, and I had visited a couple of local shops, without luck. My last calling point was to be Church Street Bookshop. Melville was missing there too but there was a mint used hardcover copy of Duffy is Dead, on sale for £1.50. The price was so insultingly low that buying it felt unavoidable, like some form of redress. There was a dedication on the front free endpaper. I could only make out “Good wishes” and “March 1989”, right at the top; the rest I barely registered. Every used book is an irretrievable story; an inscribed one adds a neglectful ghost to the equation. Unlike most readers of used books, I despise these messages, but for £1.50 I was willing to suspend my principles. I paid and left.

My daughter was waiting outside, finishing an ice cream. She asked if I’d had luck with Bartleby... I said that I hadn’t, but that I had found something better. I showed her the book and groaned that I regretted that it was signed. As I showed her the inscription I realised the surname of the signatory was “O’Neill”.

“Wait a minute,” I said; “I can’t make out the name… But the surname is the same as the author’s… Now that’s a coincidence!”

“It says Jerry, I’m pretty sure,” said my daughter. It did. Only then did I realise that there was a signature at the bottom-left. It was perfectly legible. It read: “JMONEILL”. Oh, and the book is a first edition too.

Now, either this is one of the most elaborate and niche literary pranks ever pulled off — a joke aimed at an audience of one — or I ended up with a signed copy of one of my favourite novels in a totally fortuitous manner. The former is absurdly unlikely; the latter, absurdly fortunate.

Either way, I’m happy.5

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The next stop in our journey through violence in 2026 is an essay by Walter Benjamin. First published in German as “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” in 1921, this is a notoriously difficult piece of writing. There are several translations available under the title “Critique of Violence”.1

Those in need of some help with this text might benefit from this conversation between philosophers Brad Evans and James Martel.

About the author: Walter Benjamin was a German philosopher and cultural critic who wrote prolifically about literature, politics, art, and history. His most famous works include The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Theses on the Philosophy of History, The Arcades Project, and Critique of Violence. Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou in 1940 after failing to cross from France into Spain while fleeing Nazi persecution. He is one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

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I will not write about GrantaGate. I will not write about GrantaGate. I will not write about GrantaGate. OK, I’ll write about it, but only in passing.

In the unlikely case you live in a thermos, I’m referring to last week’s controversy involving Granta magazine and the Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize. Three of the pieces shortlisted this year bear all the hallmarks of machine writing and it didn't take long for folk online to cry foul. When said stories were subsequently submitted to Pangram — an AI detector — two returned 100% AI use, the third, 89%.1 Granta published these pieces as part of a collaboration with the prize and the literary world went into an opinorrheic meltdown. The usual dim-witted takes were released into the void, from bigots blaming DEI for this potential scam, to identitarian grifters blaming everything and everyone but the alleged frauds. Granta’s excuse — that they uploaded these pieces they hadn’t chosen themselves to Claude and received inconclusive results — did little to put out the fire; the Commonwealth Foundation’s explanation — that authors submitting to the prize are expected to self-declare AI use, and that they are investigating — didn’t help either. Both responses were, to put it mildly, rather naive, proof for many opinologists that the publishing industry isn't ready for the AI takeover

My opinion on the effects of AI on literature remains boringly unchanged since we started talking about this topic three to four years ago. This escalation doesn’t change the basics, which for me can be narrowed down to the following five points:

1. The vast majority of literature produced historically is junk.

2. We believe that proportionally more literary junk is being produced these days because more people are writing than ever before, but also because a large number of literary critics are neglecting all critical duties in order to act as de facto book marketers.

3. This fertile anything-goes playing field is the perfect environment for AI junk to thrive, and yes, this tech produces junk faster than humans; but,

4. Human-generated junk isn’t necessarily better than the AI-generated type. In other words, the problem is junk, not who produces it.

5. On a more optimistic note, we now have a great opportunity to draw critical red lines and call out bad writing for what it is, without risking accusations of snobbery or elitism. In more specific terms, I mean that if a text looks as if AI could have written it, then it should be treated as junk, regardless of who produced it. This will be the case at least until AI starts delivering copy that doesn’t just rehash the most prevalent formulae and clichés.

Since I am of the idea that literature exists in spite of publishing, not because of it, whether this so-called industry is ready or not doesn’t bother me that much; and personally, I’m planning to keep writing my own stuff, even if one day I might be able to prompt C3P0 for a half-decent piece. That said, it is clear to me that the AI offensive has picked up speed and that we need to start asking some questions about the future of letters.

Where does literature exist today and where will it exist tomorrow? Will it exist at all a few years from now?

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the normalisation of the word content. I won’t repeat myself here, but I want to add something to that argument: AI isn’t as good at replicating literature as it is at replicating content. If AI ever ends up producing actual literature, it'll mean that literature and content have become indistinguishable, and when this happens, there’ll be little point in trying to salvage anything. Are we already there? I don’t think so. Will we get there eventually? I don’t think so either. Because content is purely transactional and I believe that literature — being the very human endeavour that it is — presses other affective buttons for those who care about it. I guess the Granta and Commonwealth Foundation controversy was upsetting for so many because content escaped its natural habitat — LinkedIn, Facebook, X threads, etc.2 — and stained a magazine and a prize some still associate with good writing, regardless of how often gatekeepers of this kind contribute to its ossification. It is pretty obvious to me that this will continue to happen. But there is something AI can’t steal from us, and that is literature as a shared experience.

We tend to think of writing as a solitary endeavour and to some extent it is, since most books are created in solitude. But once writing is shared it stops belonging only to the person who produced it to enter a social life of its own. Be it book lovers disagreeing about a text at a book club, an author reading to a half-empty room, or someone telling a story to a child at bedtime — all of these entail sharing a lived experience. This is where anyone who’s worrying about the AIfication of literature should focus their energies. Instead of spending your spare time uploading stories to AI detectors to nail the next literary fraudster, think about how you can help literature happen between people.

Lazy writers might be able to prompt their writing, but they won’t ever be able to stop the conversations literature starts and sustains.

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There’s an epidemic of middle-aged men filming themselves talking about life while walking through the English countryside. I mean on YouTube. During the past few weeks Mr Algo has been feeding me this tripe non-stop. Obviously, much like the infamous British far-right elfin complaining on Twitter that YouTube was showing him ads for gay dating apps, this is a public confession: yes, I’ve been searching for manly middle-aged content on YouTube.

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Last week I posted a piece about why writers shouldn’t ignore reviews on lowly sites like Goodreads, etc. Interestingly, just a couple of minutes after hitting send, I received an email that made me question the wisdom of my advice.

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The sender claimed to be an “Author Visibility Strategist” who happens to run a 35,000-member reading group on Goodreads; in the email there were links to what appeared to be a professional website and to the group’s page.1 The website was an obvious red flag,2 but the Goodreads group seemed legit, and right at the top of their home page was the following warning:

So the setup was clear enough. What confused slightly me was that the email made no mention of money. Here’s the full text:

As you can see, no money talk. But if the AI-sculpted tone of the email, its opening flattery pivoting to a problem and a hinted solution, the vagueness of the proposal, and the closing engagement question don’t make it clear this is a scam, I don’t know what would. Since I was curious to see where the imbroglio was going, I replied anyway, saying that of course they could feature my book. And I even briefly entertained their craft question. After all I’m an author — therefore starved for attention — and this was someone who had read my book. Who am I to judge my readers’ morals?

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You will have seen it enough on your favourite social media platform: an Author Online reminding you that thou shalt not look upon what readers say of thy work on Goodreads. This generally happens after someone bumps into a negative review of one of their recent masterpieces. And perhaps for that reason there’ll be plenty of sympathetic replies to the self-pitying commandment, mainly from other writers, who’ll agree that one is best avoiding those plebeian circles of Hell.

There are many things I find irritating about this faux noble indifference, and I can’t say which one irks me the most. Is it the humblebragging about being a published author? Is it the arrogance of expecting everyone to love your work and reacting like it’s a personal affront when someone doesn’t? Is it the snobbery of believing that the unqualified masses shouldn't have opinions about books in unqualified spaces? Is it the pretence that writers don’t actively seek out what others think about their work on Goodreads, on the StoryGraph, and in practically every interaction they have with another human being? Is it all of the above combined? I can’t say and it doesn’t matter.

What matters is that if you are wilfully ignoring what others say about your work, you are missing a trick. And by the way, this applies to any writer at any stage of their career, not just the published elite.

Because this is a problem that starts long before anyone gets published.

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