Benedict Sangster
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benedictsangster.bsky.social
Benedict Sangster
@benedictsangster.bsky.social
200 followers 210 following 230 posts
Writer, Norwich, UK. Lover of all animals. Books and nothing else

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benedictsangster.bsky.social
'[...] the foam of past sorrows
folds into itself
like a flat mirror.'

Very excited to receive (amid other goodies) Telenovela by Gonzalo C. Garcia, the latest from @galleybeggars.bsky.social - available now to order!
A blue and white on black Galley Buddy copy of Gonzalo C. Garcia's Telenovela; the very smart packaging it came in; and several postcards depicting anti-Pinochet slogans and images.
November 23, 2025 at 2:32 PM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
New acquisitions:

The Vegetarian - Han Kang, tr. Deborah Smith

The Outsider - Albert Camus, tr. Sandra Smith

Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner
The Vegetarian - Han Kang, tr. Deborah Smith The Outsider - Albert Camus, tr. Sandra Smith Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner Three books together on a wooden tabletop
November 14, 2025 at 12:32 PM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
A gift from my mother: The Book of Saints, compiled by the Benedictine monks of St Augustine's Abbey, Ramsgate
The Book of Saints A book with a black cover bearing the above title, featuring an unnamed aureoled saint reading from a book we can probably presume to be the Bible.
November 6, 2025 at 3:24 PM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
CHAPTER XXV A damn'd cramp piece of penmanship as ever I saw in my life! She Stoops to Conquer.
November 5, 2025 at 11:27 AM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
Thrilled to receive these delightful editions from @renardpress.com's impressive Classic Fiction selection:

Three Lives - Gertrude Stein
It Can't Happen Here - Sinclair Lewis
Venus and Adonis - William Shakespeare
Catharine of the Bower - Jane Austen
Three Lives - Gertrude Stein It Can't Happen Here - Sinclair Lewis Venus and Adonis - William Shakespeare Catharine of the Bower with The Beautiful Cassandra - Jane Austen A selection of classics from Renard Press on a sunlit wooden table.
November 4, 2025 at 12:30 PM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
'Only yesterday, in love —'

~ Parting, from Anna Akhmatova's Selected Poems, tr. Richard McKane
Parting Evening, sloping path before me. Only yesterday, in love - he implored, 'Don't forget.' Now only the winds and the cries of the shepherds. The cedars in uproar by the clean springs.
October 29, 2025 at 8:47 AM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
Had a great morning browsing local independent writers, publishers, and makers at Norwich Book Festival at the Forum, coming away with lots including these three from the lovely people at @salopress.bsky.social
woman│folk - Karan Chambers FANG CODA - Ross Scott-Buccleuch lycanthrope - Zoë Brigley Three volumes of poetry on a wooden background, lit by the soft orange glow of artificial light.
October 25, 2025 at 5:47 PM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
I learned what I had read in books but never actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and any time you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.
October 22, 2025 at 12:39 PM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
'[...] the one that failed the most tragically and the most splendidly.'

William Faulkner on his favourite of his works, The Sound and the Fury. Taken from the authoritative and deeply insightful The Life of William Faulkner, by Richard Gray
[...] but in one respect at least he was remarkably consistent: when asked what his personal favourite was among his books, he never tired of saying it was The Sound and the Fury, 'the one that failed the most tragically and the most splendidly'. 'I like the one which caused me the most trouble', he declared in an interview. 'That is The Sound and the Fury.' And elsewhere, in his class conferences at Virginia, he continued this line of thought: The Sound and the Fury, he insisted: was the best failure. It was the one I anguished the most over, that I worked the hardest at, that even when I knew I couldn't bring it off, I still worked at it... The others that have been easier to write... I don't have the feeling toward any of them that I do toward that one... The Life of William Faulkner - Richard Grey A red and white critical biography of the life and works of William Faulkner, featuring the great Southern writer at his most dapper on the front cover
October 14, 2025 at 4:35 PM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
Two not-so-new acquisitions:

Selected Poems - Anna Akhmatova, tr. Richard McKane, with a 1964 introductory essay by Andrei Sinyavsky

Fair Stood the Wind for France - H. E. Bates
Penguin Modern European Poets - Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems H. E. Bates, Fair Stood the Wind for France Two volumes side by side on a decidedly plush throw
October 7, 2025 at 11:38 AM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
'The veiled face of a woman, refined, disillusioned, is a suitable preface to this book which will treat sadly of sensual pleasure.'

From Colette's The Pure and the Impure, tr. Herma Briffault; an 'unforgettable gallery of eccentrics'
Colette - The Pure and the Impure
October 6, 2025 at 3:58 PM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
"It has come too late."

Jean Rhys on her rediscovery and subsequent literary acclaim after decades of obscurity.

#booksky
Later years From 1960, and for the rest of her life, Rhys lived in Cheriton Fitzpaine in Devon, once described by her as "a dull spot which even drink can't enliven much." Characteristically, she remained unimpressed by her belated ascent to literary fame, commenting, "It has come too late." In an interview shortly before her death she questioned whether any novelist, not least herself, could ever be happy for any length of time: "If I could choose I would rather be happy than write... if I could live my life all over again, and choose...."
September 25, 2025 at 5:17 PM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
Fragment from the incomplete epigraph to Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, in a superb translation by Julie Rose
As long as social damnation exists, through laws and customs, artificially creating hell at the heart of civilization and muddying a destiny that is divine with human calamity; as long as the three problems of the century - man's debasement through the proletariat, woman's demoralization through hunger, the wasting of the child through darkness - are not resolved; as long as social suffocation is possible in certain areas; in other words, and to take an even broader view, as long as ignorance and misery exist in this world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless. -- Victor Hugo, Hauteville House, January 1, 1862
September 3, 2025 at 9:28 AM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
Some new acquisitions:

A not-so-new Cider with Rosie - Laurie Lee
Tender Buttons - Gertrude Stein
Les Misérables - Victor Hugo, tr. Julie Rose

#booksky
Cider With Rosie - Laurie Lee Tender Buttons - Gertrude Stein Les Misérables - Victor Hugo, tr. Julie Rose Arranged artlessly on a wooden table with a candle and well-worn Pusheen flask as backdrop
September 2, 2025 at 11:12 AM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
'A light pleasant void was in Gregor's heart, life was good and free from care. The red-tailed dawn was pecking up the starry grain from the dove-coloured floor of heaven.'

From Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don, tr. Stephen Garry
And Quiet Flows the Don - Mikhail Sholokhov Featuring a Don Cossack on horseback wielding a saber against a mountainous backdrop.
August 20, 2025 at 2:33 PM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
'We always kept two bullets for ourselves, two—in case one misfired.'

Irreconcileable horror in the untold stories of the women who fought in WWII, from Nobel laureate (and huge personal favourite) Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War, tr. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky
—The Germans didn't take women soldiers prisoner ... They shot them at once. Or led them before their lined-up soldiers and showed them off: look, they're not women, they're monsters. We always kept two bullets for ourselves, two—in case one misfired. One of our nurses was captured ... A day later we took back that village. There were dead horses lying about, motorcycles, armored vehicles. We found her: eyes put out, breasts cut off. They had impaled her on a stake ... It was freezing cold, and she was white as could be, and her hair was all gray ... She was nineteen years old. In her knapsack we found letters from home and a green rubber bird. A child's toy ...
August 15, 2025 at 6:16 AM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
'First love is exactly like a revolution: the regular and established order of life is in an instant smashed to fragments [...]'
Sanin and Gemma were in love for the first time, and all the miracles of first love were happening for them. First love is exactly like a revolution: the regular and established order of life is in an instant smashed to fragments; youth stands at the barricade, its banner raised high in the air, and sends its ecstatic greetings to the future, whatever it may hold - death or a new life, no matter.
August 13, 2025 at 5:59 PM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
A very beautiful cover of Spring Torrents by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Leonard Schapiro; and the epigraph from which the novel takes its title
An old Penguin Classics edition of Ivan Turgenev's Spring Torrents, with a reproduction of 'Giudetta e Oloferne' by Cristofano Allori on the cover, set against a wooden background featuring several knots, (a term I will profess to having had to google.) Those happy years, Those days so gay, Like the rush of spring torrents Have vanished away. [From a very old song]
August 11, 2025 at 6:04 PM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
'[...] and I thought to myself that nothing can make a face more impenetrable than a mask of kindliness.'

From André Gide's doomed romance Isabelle, tr. Dorothy Bussy
A pre-owned Penguin Modern Classics edition of André Gide's La Symphonie Pastorale/Isabelle, with an illustration of a monastery, which is curious since neither story is set in one.
August 6, 2025 at 8:48 AM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
His body was just as nervous as it always had been; perhaps more so. But his mind no longer skittered; nowadays, it limped carefully from one anxiety to the next.
August 4, 2025 at 4:14 PM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
Recent-ish acquisitions:

Serious Concerns - Wendy Cope
Decline and Fall - Evelyn Waugh
Three Sisters - Anton Chekhov, tr. Paul Schmidt
The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank, tr. Susan Massotty
The Disinherited - Benito Pérez Galdós, tr. Lester Clark

#booksky
A stack of books on a wooden table beginning with Serious Concerns by Wendy Cope; Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh; Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank; and The Disinherited by Benito Pérez Galdós. A dead flower and a dying basil plant are visible in the background, alongside a second, smaller stack of books.
August 2, 2025 at 6:20 PM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
The cruel vacillation of a lover, taken from the opening stanza of Thomas Hardy's I Say I'll Seek Her
"I SAY I'LL SEEK HER" I say, "I'll seek her side Ere hindrance interposes;" But eve in midnight closes, And here I still abide.
July 25, 2025 at 7:53 AM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
'We are the result of the uninterested caprice of a few bored angels who possessed only the strength and imagination necessary to invent human misery.'
[…] I fear that all the things of our earth are but the product of creation closest to us but most distant from the Father who only who only indirectly created us, for first He created powerful angels who in turn created more and more inferior angels who in the end created us. We are the result of the uninterested caprice of a few bored angels who possessed only the strength and imagination necessary to invent human misery.
July 21, 2025 at 8:50 AM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
'But the desert is as unmarked as the hands of a cadaver, all lines of destiny wiped clean.'

Really enjoying the intelligence, the unbounded creativity, and some of the simply wild paragraphs of Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra, in a masterly translation by Margaret Sayers Peden
But the desert is as unmarked as the hands of a cadaver, all lines of destiny wiped clean. Everyone knows the stories of shipwrecked men who have perished here (for only a disaster can lead a man to this remote territory), turning in hopeless circles, fighting their own shadows; inveighing against them because they do not rise from the sand; imploring them to float like cool phantoms above their owners' heads; kneeling, finally, to straddle and strangle those implacable ghosts. The brains of the ill-fated melt in this heat, and when that butter-yellow sun no longer rules the coast, the tempest reigns in its stead to complete the task. Terra Nostra - Carlos Fuentes
July 16, 2025 at 9:35 AM
benedictsangster.bsky.social
'[...] its expression of unbearable anguish so haggard and awful with sorrow you cant even cry for a thing so ugly, so lost [...]'

From Jack Kerouac's poignant later novel Big Sur, a far cry from the boundlessness, the delirious energy of On the Road, one decade before
The face of yourself you see in the mirror with its expression of unbearable anguish so haggard and awful with sorrow you cant even cry for a thing so ugly, so lost, no connection whatever with early perfection and therefore nothing to connect with tears or anything [...] Big Sur - Jack Kerouac
July 15, 2025 at 11:29 AM