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Jonathan Gibbs

@jonathangibbs.bsky.social

2.8K followers 1.1K following 4.5K posts

Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at City St George's, Uni of London. I curate the short story project apersonalanthology.com. Novels are Randall or The Painted Grape, and The Large Door. Poetry is Spring Journal. https://linktr.ee/jonathangibbs

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Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · Jan 6

2025 Reading 1: Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton. A fascinating use of format for a memoir/linguistic commentary: Barton picks fifty onomatopoeic or more broadly 'mimetic' Japanese phrases and explores their meaning to her, using the form to narrate her experience of working in Japan as a teacher.

White paperback book with dark blue text giving title, author and publisher (Fitzcarraldo Editions), set on a wooden table.

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Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 6h

I can’t find my old copy (nice big floppy softback courtesy of QPD - Quality Paperbacks Direct: remember them?) as I’ve been wanting to look back into it.

And yet there are Against the Day, V, Mason & Dixon and Bleeding Edge, sitting on my shelves, all un- or only partly read.

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Reposted by Jonathan Gibbs

Scratch Books @scratchbooks.bsky.social · 8h

Ten days to go…!

Scratch Books @scratchbooks.bsky.social · Sep 1

Scratch A4 Winter ‘25 submissions open on 13th September! Write a brilliant <1k word story!
More info here: www.scratch-books.co.uk/scratcha4com...

Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 18h

Béla Tarr’s ‘One War, One Battle, One Conflict After Another’, anyone?

(Quote from The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai- which, yes, has already been adapted as ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’)

A page of text with one line underlined: ”It was one war, one battle, one conflict after another”

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Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 19h

The Melancholy of Resistance.

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Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 21h

Some excellent ‘quote mark’ usage here from your man László Krasznahorkai.

‘systematically beat his fingers to a pulp’.

“After all, the hammer in his hand felt increasingly unsteady and the results of such experimentation would become ever more unpredictable, so, after the third effort, he had to admit that the fact that he hadn't missed the nail in three successive goes, far from being due to his level of concentration, was probably down to sheer luck, or, to employ his own formulation, to a certain ‘benevolent grace' that offered him ‘a moment of respite' before he ‘systematically beat his fingers to a pulp'”

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Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 23h

Thank you! It’s a neat concept, and I don’t blame the actor. It just needed a few more takes…

Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 23h

There’s a BBC radio trail for Children in Need with a young girl packing her school bag and pausing before she buries [something] at the bottom. It’s the whole point of the trail.

I’ve tried and tried, I’ve put my ear right up to the radio speaker, but I’ve got NO IDEA what it is.

Reposted by Jonathan Gibbs

Cormac MacFhionnlaoich @cormacscoast.bsky.social · 1d

Rockpool reflection.

A rockpool with a growing bed of Coral weed (Corallina officinalis).
County Clare, Ireland.

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Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 1d

I’ve been listening to this today, and I have to say: it’s been helping.

Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 1d

My final unhinged literary opinion is that books are good.

I will not be taking further questions at this time.

Reposted by Jonathan Gibbs

Helena Fitzgerald @hellafitzgerald.bsky.social · 1d

it’s good when novels are huge and long and even occasionally boring, it’s fundamentally a durational form

Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social · 2d

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

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Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 1d

And “opinion” as “flagrant idiocy”.

Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 1d

😠

Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 1d

My most hinged literary opinion is that about 40% of the quote-posts to this are *genuinely* bad takes and make me despair of the quality of book-readers on this site.

Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social · 2d

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

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Reposted by Jonathan Gibbs

Owen Booth @owenbooth.bsky.social · 1d

Standup comedians, podcasters, tv presenters and broadsheet journalists do not make very good novelists. But then neither does anyone else.

Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social · 2d

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

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Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 1d

Boom!

But yes I would happily follow Cordelia Grey into whatever heaving bordello of depravity you might care to imagine.

Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 1d

Ha. You and me both.

Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 1d

All books should have exactly 250 pages.

The twist should be on page 280.

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Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 1d

E. L. James’s The Children of Men…

Quote post: “While the film Children of Men is one of the best SF films of the past 30 years, the EL James novel upon which it is based is pretty terrible.
Also, as a bonus opinion: Novellas are criminally underrated as an art form. Give me a fluff-free story taken to its logical end point and walk away.”
Original post: “Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social • 6h
Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat”

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Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 1d

All reading is comfort reading.

Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 1d

Books on the tube

The Emigrants by WG Sebald
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
One of Us by Elizabeth Day
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Pistols in St Paul's by Fiona Smyth
Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan
Internal Family Systems Therapy by Richard Schwartz

Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 2d

Thank you! Fascinating. A question: do you know how the film the National Theatre Live-style things? Theatre for cinema/tv screens. Is that similar?

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Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 2d

I’ve been rereading Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time this year, a book a month. October was Books Do Furnish a Room, one of my favourites in the series so far. A short thread:

Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 3d

2026 Reading 60: Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell. #10 in my year-long reread of A Dance to the Music of Time, and an absolute corker, both for its treatment of relationship between Pamela, Widmerpool and X Trapnel (‘Un Amour de Widmerpool’?) and for the extensive satire of publishing.

Paperback copy of Books Do Furnish a Room, with a pen and ink illustration of X Trapnel, a man with a severe face sporting a beatnik beard and a pair of dark glasses, and wearing a belted Macintosh over a black shirt with a green tie with an illustration of a naked woman on it. Under his arm he has a copy of a literary journal - you can see the title: FISSION - and a long thin stick with a white skull as its handle. Behind him, lying face down on a single bed is a naked woman with her hands seemingly embedded in her long hair.

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Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · 2d

If we destroy the planet and humanity goes extinct, is the time that comes afterwards still comprehensible as numbered ‘years’?

<Sits in silence for a bit>

Reposted by Jonathan Gibbs

WHAT A FUCKING RECORD @whatafuckingrecord.bsky.social · 3d

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