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Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer

@eldashraheb.bsky.social

3.1K followers 4.5K following 1.9K posts

https://www.abeelraheb.com Egyptian-American Editor and Writer (WGA West) Desperately trying to learn Spanish We are such stuff as dreams are made on.

www.abeelraheb.com

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Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · Jun 18

Once again, I’m reading Nabakov shit on your (and my) faves, while praising them too. Always a great time. #booksky 💙📚

Chesterton, G. K. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14. Essentially a writer for very young people. Romantic in the large sense.
• Conan Doyle, Arthur. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14, but no longer.
Essentially a writer for very young people. Romantic in the large sense.
• Conrad, Joseph. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14. Essentially a writer for very young people. Certainly inferior to Hemingway and Wells. Intolerable souvenir-shop style, romanticist clichés. Nothing I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, hopelessly juvenile. Romantic in the large sense. Slightly bogus.
• Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Dislike him. A cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. A prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. Some of his scenes are extraordinarily amusing. Nobody takes his reactionary journalism seriously.
• The Double. His best work, though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's "Nose."
• The Brothers Karamazov. Dislike it intensely.
• Crime and Punishment. Dislike it intensely. Ghastly rigmarole.
• Douglas, Norman. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter.
• Dreiser, Theodore. Dislike him. A formidable mediocrity.
• Eliot, T. S. Not quite first-rate.
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo. His poetry is delightful.
• Faulkner, William. Dislike him. Writer of corncobby chronicles. To consider them masterpieces is an absurd delusion. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me.
• Flaubert, Gustave. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter.
Read complete works between 14 and 15.
• Forster, E. M. Only read one of his novels (possibly A Passage to India?) and disliked it.
• Freud, Sigmund. A figure of fun. Loathe him. Vile deceit. Freudian interpretation of dreams is charlatanic, and satanic, nonsense.
• Galsworthy, John. A formidable mediocrity.
• García Lorca, Federico. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up.
• Gogol, Nikolai. Nobody takes his mystical didacticism seriously. At his worst, as in his Ukrainian stu…

• Hemingway, Ernest. A writer of books for boys. Certainly better than Conrad.
Has at least a voice of his own. Nothing I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, hopelessly juvenile. Loathe his works about bells, balls, and bulls.
• The Killers. Delightful, highly artistic. Admirable.
• The Old Man and the Sea. Wonderful. The description of the iridescent fish and rhythmic urination is superb.
• Housman, A. E. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter.
• Ilf and Petrov. Two wonderfully gifted writers. Absolutely first-rate fiction.
• Ivanov, Georgy. A good poet but a scurrilous critic.
• James, Henry. Dislike him rather intensely, but now and then his wording causes a kind of electric tingle. Certainly not a genius.
• Joyce, James. Great. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter.
Let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is patball to Joyce's champion game. A genius.
• Ulysses. A divine work of art. Greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose.
Towers above the rest of Joyce's writing. Noble originality,
unique lucidity of
thought and style. Molly's monologue is the weakest chapter in the book.
Love it for its lucidity and precision.
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Never liked it. A feeble and garrulous book.
• Finnegans Wake. A formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book. Conventional and drab, redeemed from utter insipidity only by infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations. Detest it. A cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory. Indifferent to it, as to all regional literature written in dialect. A tragic failure and a frightful bore.
• Kafka, Franz.
• The Metamorphosis. Second-greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose.
• Kazantzakis, Nikos. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up.
• Keats, John. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter.
• Khodasevich, Vladislav. The gr…

• Lawrence, D. H. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. Mediocre. Fakes realism with easy platitudes. Execrable.
• Lowell, Robert. Not a good translator. A greater offender than Auden.
• Mandelshtam, Osip. A wonderful poet, the greatest in Soviet Russia. His poems are admirable specimens of the human mind at its deepest and highest. Not as good as Blok. His tragic fate makes his poetry seem greater than it actually is.
• Mann, Thomas. Dislike him. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up.
• Death in Venice. Asinine. To consider it a masterpiece is an absurd delusion.
Poshlost. Mediocre, but anyway plausible.
• Maupassant, Guy de. Certainly not a genius.
• Maugham, W. Somerset. Mediocre. Fakes realism with easy platitudes.
Certainly not a genius.
• Melville, Herman. Love him. One would like to have filmed him at breakfast, feeding a sardine to his cat.
• Marx, Karl. Loathe him.
• Milton, John. A genius.
• Odoevsky, Vladimir. Indifferent to his works.
• Yury Olesha. Some absolutely first-rate fiction.
• Orczy, Baroness Emmuska.
• The Scarlet Pimpernel. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, but no longer.
• Pasternak, Boris. An excellent poet, but a poor novelist.
• Doctor Zhivago. Detest it. Melodramatic and vilely written. To consider it a masterpiece is an absurd delusion. Pro-Bolshevist, historically false. A sorry thing, clumsy, trivial, melodramatic, with stock situations and trite coincidences.
• Pirandello, Luigi. Never cared for him.
• Plato. Not particularly fond of him.
• Poe, Edgar Allan. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, but no longer. One would like to have filmed his wedding.
• Pound, Ezra. Definitely second-rate. A total fake. A venerable fraud.
• Proust, Marcel. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter.
• In Search of Lost Time. The first half is the fourth-greatest masterpiece of 20th-century prose.

• Queneau, Raymond.
• Exercises de style. A thrilling masterpiece, one of the greatest stories in French literature.
• Zazie. Very fond of it.
• Ransom, John Crowe.
• Captain Carpenter. Admire this poem.
• Rimbaud, Arthur. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter.
• Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Great. A favorite. How freely one breathes in his marvelous labyrinths! Lucidity of thought, purity of poetry. Magnificently poetical and original.
• Rolland, Romain. A formidable mediocrity.
• Salinger, J. D. By far one of the finest artists in recent years.
• "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." A great story. A particular favorite.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Even more awful than Camus.
• Nausea. Second-rate. A tense-looking but really very loose type of writing.
• Schwartz, Delmore.
• "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." A particular favorite.
• Schweitzer, Albert. Detest him.
• Shakespeare, William. Read complete works between 14 and 15. One would like to have filmed him in the role of the King's Ghost. His verbal poetic texture is the greatest the world has ever known, and immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. It is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play. A genius.
• Sterne, Laurence. Love him.
• Sue, Eugène. Melodramatic, second-rate.
• Tagore, Rabindranath. A formidable mediocrity.
• Tolstoy, Aleksey. A writer of some talent with two or three science fiction stories or novels which are memorable.
• Tolstoy, Leo. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. Read complete works between 14 and 15. Nobody takes his utilitarian moralism seriously. A genius.
• Anna Karenina. Incomparable prose artistry. The supreme masterpiece of 19th-century literature.
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich. A close second to Anna Karenina.
• Resurrection. Detest it.
• The Kreutzer Sonata. Detest it.
• War and Peace. A little too long. A rollicking historical novel written for the general reader, specifically for the young. Artistically unsatisfying.
Cumbersome mes…

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Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 3h

My favorite area in the game

Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 3h

I’m not a huge fan of Thomas Pynchon, but he really understands this country and was ahead of his time

Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 4h

I’ve written 102 poems in the last month and a half 😵‍💫. Almost done with my first book 🤞🏼
#booksky 💙📚 #wip #poetry

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Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer

tinybaby @tiny.baby · 4h

you know one thing that really pisses me off is that the common wisdom is that it's just not possible to figure out a way to stop apps from popping up in front of what you're doing sometimes. not true. that is not true. it's just nobody cares to do it

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Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 4h

When is the bootleg series for Knocked Out Loaded coming? I need 27 takes of “Brownsville Girl,” I’m not content with “New Danville Girl”

Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 4h

He looks like a man at sea these days. Like he knows a massive backlash is coming to his music and him as a person so he’s quietly prepping for it by entrenching himself in diversified power structures

Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 5h

Any LA pals interested in checking this out in November? Looks like a groovy take on Shakespeare’s The Life of Pablo

Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 5h

I think Dylan Thomas is a good way to get teens into poetry. Just look at this shit
#booksky 💙📚

From Dylan Thomas’ “Grief Thief of Time”

Now Jack my fathers let the time-faced crook, Death flashing from his sleeve, With swag of bubbles in a seedy sack Sneak down the stallion grave,
Bull's-eye the outlaw through a eunuch crack And free the twin-boxed grief,
No silver whistles chase him down the weeks' Dayed peaks to day to death,
These stolen bubbles have the bites of snakes And the undead eye-teeth,
No third eye probe into a rainbow's sex
That bridged the human halves,
All shall remain and on the graveward gulf
Shape with my fathers' thieves.

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Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 5h

Like it or not, the first hour of The Master is PTA’s most original contribution to the medium

Isaac Feldberg @isaacfeldberg.bsky.social · 5h

Let’s not get carried away: THE MASTER is still Paul Thomas Anderson’s best (but OBAA is absolutely in contention for his second-best).

Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 5h

Now this is pod racing

Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 9h

An STD in human form

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Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer

Christopher Wiggins @cwnewser.bsky.social · 11h

Rest in power, Miss Major.

www.advocate.com/news/miss-ma...

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, activist since Stonewall, has died

The LGBTQ+ community — and particularly the transgender community — has lost an iconic activist.

www.advocate.com

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Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer

Lee Zimmerman @zim2918.bsky.social · 10h

End of summer

This work © 2025 by Lee Zimmerman is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

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Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer

Emily Gorcenski @emily.gorcen.ski · 10h

4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

“Entirely inappropriate.”

(The agency managing partner is on the Epstein list.)

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Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 11h

m.youtube.com/watch?v=k9If...

Johnny Cash-The_Man_Comes Around

YouTube video by TheJohnnyCashChannel

m.youtube.com

Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer

mr pussy @mrpussy.xyz · 12h

I love the inflatable costumes from a purely strategic standpoint because it quite effectively takes the wind out of the sails of "war-torn portland" "antifa supersoldier" type rhetoric. it happened organically and dare I say, memetically, but it works

Razzball @razzball.bsky.social · 12h

STOP THE ANTIFA TERRORISTS

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Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 12h

I feel like Stranger Things’ final season has been looming for the past five years

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Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 13h

Insane that Shakespeare wrote this relatively early in his career, casually invents the phrase “time out of mind,” and I wouldn’t put this in his top 25.
#booksky 💙📚

Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech:

O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes In shape no bigger than an agate-stone On the fore-finger of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomies Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders' legs, The cover of the wings of grasshoppers, The traces of the smallest spider's web, The collars of the moonshine's watery beams, Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film, Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on court'sies straight,
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees, O'er ladies ' lips, who straight on kisses dream, Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues, Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are:
Sometime she gallops o'er a courtier's nose, And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's nose as a' lies asleep, Then dreams, he of another benefice:
Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck, And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats, Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades, Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes, And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two And sleeps again. This is that very Mab That plats the manes of horses in the night, And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs, Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes:
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs, That presses them and learns them first to bear, Making them women of good carriage:
This is she—

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Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 1d

What’s it called when a work is about its own process? Not meta, I’m looking for a word where the style and theme are in line with the piece’s construction

Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer

Kaleb Horton @kalebhorton.bsky.social · Nov 14

The Dilbert Project. kalebhorton.ghost.io/the-d-lbert-...

The D*lbert Project

I wish I could remember why I made this. All I know is it was 2013 and I was busted ass broke, sleeping on a mattress on the floor of my dad’s office. I had no prospects left. Everything I had fit com...

kalebhorton.ghost.io

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Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 1d

Philosophy = what is what? And how is why?

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Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer

Dom Pedro Ricardo 🌳 Dom Pedro II Aeternum 🇧🇷 📐 💮 @newelizabethan.bsky.social · 1d

Horrific.

All governments must refocus their attention onto climate action.

Alongside major inequality and matters of war and peace, this is the key issue of our age.

Planet’s first catastrophic climate tipping point reached, report says, with coral reefs facing ‘widespread dieback’

Unless global heating is reduced to 1.2C ‘as fast as possible’, warm water coral reefs will not remain ‘at any meaningful scale’, a report by 160 scientists from 23 countries warns

www.theguardian.com

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Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 1d

Marc Maron’s podcast ending with Obama feels like the definitive end of poptimism

Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 1d

Beautiful

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Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 1d

Really love this cover

m.youtube.com/watch?v=oJec...

Paul Simon - Surfer Girl (An All-Star Tribute to Brian Wilson) HD

YouTube video by Paul Nero

m.youtube.com

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